Early exploration, early settlement, and the Revolutionary War
*Introduce concept of
‘pre-historic’ as before written records, as introduction to
pre-historic Indians. Anything before history is, properly
speaking, archaeology.
*For many years, no-one really knew where the Indians came from.
Before the theory of evolution was widespread, some people thought that
the Indians were, in fact, the lost tribes of Israel, or that they were
some other group that had somehow come over from Africa or
Europe. Now it is generally held that they came from Asia during
the ice age, when there was a land bridge across the Bering
Strait. Some may have also come from Southeast Asia or Polynesia
by boat.
*Wandering nomads, known to anthropologists as Paleo-Indians or
Paleolithic Indians (‘paleo’ being a prefix meaning ‘really old’),
first came to Tennessee hunting wooly mammoths and mastodons and other
megafauna, probably about 15,000 BC. Although they hunted in
Tennessee, it is difficult to call them Tennesseans, because as far as
we know, they had no permanent settlements. What evidence we have
comes from campsites where they left stone tools and weapons, bones,
and the remains of camp fires.
*By about 8,000 BC, some of these nomadic hunters had settled down, and
become hunter-gatherers, known to anthropologists as Archaic Indians
(‘archaic’ means ‘old’). As they came to understand the local
area better (and as the climate improved) they drew more and more
sustenance from plants, although they did not really practise
agriculture yet. We do have evidence of houses and small
villages, which tended to be alongside rivers. Archaeologists
have found signs of weighted nets and stone hooks, probably used for
fishing, as well as more advanced stone tools, tools made of antlers,
and we know that they had a new weapon, the atl-atl.
*The Archaic Indians evolved and developed over time into a more
advanced and productive culture which deserved a new name, so that the
period 1,000 BC to about 900 AD is known as the Woodland Period.
The Woodland Indians developed the bow and arrow, which allowed for a
faster, more efficient rate of fire than the old-fashioned spears (and
let a hunter carry more missiles). They also developed true
agriculture, growing corn, squash, beans (the three sisters) and
sunflowers, which were domesticated in the Southeast. They made
pottery and lived in good-sized villages.
*They also apparently practiced ritual burial, burying their dead in
mounds with various tools, treasures, and other goods, which
anthropologists say means they probably believed in an afterlife of
some kind. Among the largest and most famous of these mounds are
the Pinson Mounds in Madison County near Jackson, some of which are
about 70 feet high. The Woodland Indians had extensive trade
networks, as their burial mounds have, when excavated, contained shells
from the gulf coast, copper from the Great Lakes, and other trade goods
from around the Eastern US and even parts of Mexico.
*The Woodland Indians seem to have had a more complex social structure,
with important family ties, but also concepts of clans, tribes, and
some kind of hierarchy and leadership. Eventually this evolved
into a more advanced society called the Mississippian Culture.
*The Mississippian Period runs from about 900 AD to the point of
contact with Europeans in the 16th century (c. 1550), when the historic
period begins. The Mississippians had even wider trade networks
than the Woodland Indians. They had large towns—Cahokia in
Illinois held about 10,000 people (at a time when London had 30,000 to
40,000 people). They had larger and more elaborate burial mounds,
as well as mounds on which important buildings (such as temples) were
built. Their leadership became more powerful, sometimes with one
chief controlling several villages and towns, and their religious
ceremonies became more involved, sometimes involving human
sacrifice. They also grew even more kinds of crops, and produced
more elaborate pottery, including pottery that was decorative in
addition (or even instead of) just being functional containers.
*For reasons not fully understood, the Mississippian culture began to
fall apart around 1500. The big cities were abandoned, trade
routes were used less, and the population of the region apparently
declined. This may have been due to increased warfare among the
tribes in the area, but the reason is not fully known.
Presumably, the Mississippian Indians were the direct ancestors of some
or all of the major historic Indian tribes of Tennessee, the Chickasaws
of Western Tennessee and Mississippi (and the Choctaws of Mississippi,
Alabama, and Florida, who were related to them), the Shawnee who at one
time had a few villages and extensive hunting grounds in Middle
Tennessee, the Creek of Middle Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and
Florida, and perhaps even the Cherokee of East Tennessee and the
Carolinas. (The Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and later
the Seminole (a subgroup of the Creek) were called the Five Civilised
Tribes.
*The Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek are all native to the Southern US,
and speak Muskogean languages. The Shawnee speak an Algonquian
language, and are native to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, although
pressure from the Iroquois drove them into Tennessee in the
1600s. The Cherokee spoke an Iroquoian language, and came south
from around Pennsylvania some time before European contact, although
there is some debate exactly when—it may have been around 1000 AD or
earlier, or as late as 1500; eventually they displaced the Creek and
another Indian tribe, the Yuchi (probably violently), who had lived in
East Tennessee earlier, and with the Creek, pushed the Iroquois out of
Middle Tennessee in the 1700s.
*The Cherokee lived in four major groups of settlements, the Upper and
Middle Towns in North Carolina, the Lower Towns in South Carolina, and
the Overhill Towns in Tennessee. They were the largest of the
southern tribes, and one of the largest Indian nations in American at
the time (as well as now), and probably had a population of about
20,000-30,000 in the 1600s and 1700s.
*All Southern Indian tribes had strict division of labour. Women
raised children, tended crops, built houses, and made clothes.
Men hunted, fished, made war, made the tools and weapons needed for all
those things and (for the most part) ran the government, such as it
was—in truth, leaders were the people who could convince others to
follow them, as there was no organized structure for forcing others to
obey. Because hunting and fishing and war were viewed as sports
by Europeans, they tended to view Indian men as lazy.
*The first Europeans to visit Tennessee were probably the Spaniards led
by Hernando DeSoto—they were certainly the first ones to keep records
that have survived to the present. In 1540, he led an expedition
of about 600 Spaniards, their slaves, and their livestock into
Tennessee (having left Florida the previous year). They probably
passed through the southern part of the state, although they may have
gotten as far north as Knoxville. They were looking for gold, and
were disappointed, of course.
*They were not kind to the local Indians (including the Cherokee and
the Yuchi): they often plundered towns, and demanded that the
Indians provide them with servants or slaves, and they sometimes
slaughtered whole towns that would not co-operate with them.
Although the Spaniards could beat the Indians in open warfare—in once
instance, the 600 Spaniards killed 2,000-6,000 Choctaw while only
losing 40 killed on their own side. After that, the Indians
turned to guerilla warfare, and harassed the Spanish across the
south. Eventually they crossed the Mississippi (in fact, they
were the first Europeans known to have even seen it), where De Soto
died of fever. His men buried his body in the river at night, so
the Indians would not know he was dead and desecrate his body.
*De Soto’s mission officially claimed large parts of Alabama and
Mississippi for Spain, but it also discouraged Spain from sending many
more expeditions to the area. In 1566 Juan Pardo visited the area
with another military expedition, possibly staying near Chatanooga, and
even building a few buildings there (the first European buildings in
Tennessee), but he got along with the Indians about as well as De Soto,
and eventually left, leaving only bad memories behind. No other
Europeans visited Tennessee for over a century.
*Europeans had originally wanted to explore the New World for gold, and
when the Spanish could not find gold, the fountain of youth, or
anything else worthwhile in Florida, everyone pretty much gave up for a
while. Eventually tobacco made Virginia profitable, and rice and
indigo made South Carolina wealthy, but what made the interior of the
continent valuable was fur.
*Indians had always hunted for food, hides, furs, and other things
needed for life, as well as for fun, but, for the most part, had not
seriously depleted any of the species in North America. When
Europeans first came into Tennessee, buffalo and elk could still be
found in the state, sometimes in decent numbers, and they remain in a
few place names, like Buffalo Mountain.
*Europeans, though, wanted furs for trade, to make into coats, hats,
and other fashionable items. In return, they could offer the
Indians metal tools, woven cloth, and firearms—all things they wanted
but could not make for themselves. Eventually this would make the
Indians completely dependent on the Europeans, until they forgot how to
make bows and arrows, or to hunt with them as their ancestors had, and
they could not take care of themselves without trading furs.
Eventually this made their hunting an extractive industry that badly
depopulated the wildlife in the American interior. With furs so
valuable, many of the first explorers in Tennessee after the Spaniards
gave up, were interested in the fur trade.
*In 1673, Father Jaques Marquette (a Catholic priest and missionary)
and Louis Joliet (a fur trapper), two French explorers passed through
Tennessee. They were traveling down the Mississippi by canoe from
the Great Lakes down to modern Arkansas. Among other places, they
probably camped on the bluffs near where Memphis is today.
*In the same year, two English traders working for Abraham Wood of
Virginia came to Tennessee. James Needham, and Gabriel Arthur
(his servant) set out from near modern Petersburg, Virginia, traveled
south to North Carolina, then across the mountains into the Overhill
towns. There they befriended the Cherokee, who appreciated making
allies against Spain, whom they still hated. On the way back,
Needham was killed, but Arthur remained with the Indians, learnt some
of their languages, and traveled with them along their hunting and
trading routes from Ohio to Florida, before heading back to
Virginia. The Cherokee and the English would largely remain
friends for the next century.
*Although the French would send other expeditions to Tennessee—Sieur de
la Salle would travel the Mississippi in 1682, claiming the whole
Mississippi basin from France in the name of King Louis, and in 1692
Martin Chatier and his Shawnee wife would set up a trading station at
French Lick (Nashville) and maintain it until 1714, ultimately the
English would dominate the area, particularly the merchants of
Charles-Town, South Carolina.
*The English had a profound effect on the Indians of Tennessee,
especially the Cherokee. Although they had been loosely organized
before, with family and clan ties meaning far more than the authority
of each village’s chief, the English demanded the Cherokee have some
central authority they could deal with. At various times the
English recognised one or another Cherokee leader as the ‘emperor’ of
the Cherokee, and by the 1750s there was some tribe-wide government
structure, although it was not always enough to control the various
towns and individual warriors.
*One of the most influential connections made between the English and
the Cherokee came in 1730, when Sir Alexander Cummings, a Scottish
baronet and adventurer traveled to the major Cherokee towns, recognised
the chief Moytoy as Cherokee emperor, and invited six young chiefs to
go to England with him. They were treated very well there and
were very popular with the people of London. They met King George
II and pledged friendship with him, and they all remained friends of
England for the rest of their lives. The most important of these
was also the youngest, Atta-kulla-kulla, the Little Carpenter.
*Some Cherokee still hated the English, of course. Among these
was Atta-kulla-kulla’s brother, Oconostota, who thought the English
were deliberately infecting the Indians with smallpox (to which they
had no natural immunity), and at times he was probably right.
Oconostota himself had suffered from smallpox, and was scarred for life.
*In the 1750s, the British are worried about the French. The
French are getting some of the best furs out of the west (west of the
Appalachians) and they are inciting the Indians to attack frontier
settlements. Furthermore, the colonies are getting more populous,
and the people (especially the rich, for wealth is often measured by
land) want more land. So, to get a hold in the west, in the vast
areas Virginia claims, many wealthy and influential Virginians,
including Governor Dinwiddie and Lawrence and Augustus Washington, form
the Ohio Company to survey, settle and sell 500,000 acres in the Ohio
River Valley.
*George Washington, aged 21, is sent to Fort Duquesne and tells the French to leave the area. They say ‘non.’
*George Washington goes home and reports. He is made a Lt. Col.
of militia and is sent by Governor Dinwiddie with about 150 militiamen
into this territory to investigate French forts in the area. He
comes upon Ft Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), encounters a French patrol and
ambushes it, driving it off. The French prepared to
counterattack, and Washington built Ft Necessity. He was besieged
and defeated in ten hours on 4 July 1754.
*Thus the French and Indian War begins. It is sometimes called
the Great War for Empire, because French and Indian was is no longer
politically correct. It is also called the Seven Years War
because it lasted 7 years in Europe (but 9 in America).
1754: A conference is held at Albany with the intention of
getting the Iroquois to strengthen their alliance with Britain and of
co-ordinating colonial war plans. At this conference, Benjamin
Franklin suggests the Albany Plan of Union, under which the colonies
would have a common government to lead them through this (and possibly
future) crisis. The plan is rejected because the colonies do not
want to give up their autonomy. They do not feel they have enough
in common.
1755: General Edward Braddock, 60 years old and experienced in
European warfare, is sent to America. He leads 1,460 regulars and
about 450 militiamen into the forest and is badly defeated (and killed)
in an ambush near Ft Duquesne by the French and the Indians.
1756: The war spreads to Europe and around the world.
1754-1757: The war goes very badly for the British. Indian
raids kill and scalp hundreds along the frontier, and the British send
little aid.
1757: William Pitt becomes PM. He raises taxes, decides to
concentrate on Canada, and sends more troops to America, and the tide
begins to turn.
*During the time, the English, especially the governors of the
Carolinas and Virginia, had tried to get the Cherokee to go to war
against the French and their Indian allies, but the Cherokee were
reluctant to go to war and leave their homes undefended—after all, they
still had enemies among the local Creek, Chickasaw, and the more
distant (but still dangerous) Shawnee.
*In 1753 Governor James Glen of South Carolina had already built Fort
Prince George in western South Carolina to make the Cherokee feel safe,
and he proposed building another one in the interior. However,
Glen was replaced by a new governor, William Henry Lyttelton, and plans
were delayed.
*In 1756, 80 British regulars and 120 South Carolina provincial troops
under Captain Raymond Demere and Captain John Stuart left Fort Prince
George with an engineer, John William Gerard DeBrahm. Demere and
DeBrahm did not get along, and it was unpleasant work, but Fort Loudoun
(named after the Earl of Loudoun, commander in chief of all British
forces in America) was finished in 1757, and it was a model of modern
military engineering (see page 14). Shortly afterwards, both
Demere and Stuart, who were popular with the Cherokee, departed, and
were replaced by Demere’s brother, Paul, who was obnoxious and
demanding to the Indians.
*Despite this, the Cherokee, now feeling that their families were safe,
sent their warriors north to fight the French and the Indian
allies. However, they were not treated with the respect they felt
they deserved while they were at war, and some came home. On the
way, they stole some horses and plundered some cabins in
Virginia. In response, the Virginians killed some of the Indians,
who had thought they were just sharing the possessions of their allies.
*In retaliation, the relatives of the warriors who were killed went out
to murder other Englishmen, and ended up killing some innocent South
Carolinians in 1759, which drew Governor Lyttelton’s attention.
He immediately cut off all shipments of guns and ammunition to the
Cherokee.
*This was too much for the Cherokee, so Oconostota led a group of
chiefs to Charles-Town to negotiate with the governor. By this
point, Lyttelton was organising a military expedition against the
Cherokee, so he took Oconostota and all his companions hostage,
imprisoning them at Fort Prince George. Eventually he changed his
mind, and agreed to release Oconostota in return for him turning over
the warriors who were guilty of the murders. The other chiefs
would remain as hostages.
*About this time, Stuart came to Fort Prince George, and Oconostota,
who liked him, gave him an armed guard to guide him safely to Loudoun.
*Oconostota waited for Lyttelton and most of his troops to leave Fort
Prince George, then convinced the commander of the fort, Lieutenant
Coytmore, to come out in the open, where hidden sharpshooters gunned
him down. This was in revenge for another incident in which
Coytmore had allowed his drunken officers to rape two Cherokee women
earlier that year (1760). Thereupon, the soldiers in the fort
killed all the hostages, and England and the Cherokee were at war,
despite the efforts of Atta-kulla-kulla and John Stuart to stop it.
*Oconostota next went to Fort Loudoun, placed it under siege in March
1760, and resisted the efforts of Lyttelton to relieve the fort.
By August, after almost five months without resupply, the defenders of
Fort Loudoun—soldiers, workers, and many of their families—were starved
out. Oconostota offered to let them go (and even keep their
muskets) if they would leave the cannon and plenty of gunpowder behind.
*The party of 180 soldiers and 60 or more women and children camped 15
miles away from the fort, but soon noticed that the hunting party that
was supposed to escort them to South Carolina kept vanishing. In
the morning, 700 Cherokee attacked, killing 6 soldiers and 3
women. Demere was tortured to death—scalped, made to dance, and
then his limbs were hacked off one at a time, and as he died his mouth
was stuffed with dirt as the Indians told him if he wanted land they
would give it him—but Stuart was protected at the orders of
Atta-kulla-kulla, who later bought him from his captor. Most of
the soldiers and their families were eventually ransomed back to South
Carolina.
*The next year, 1761, the Lyttelton sent Colonel James Grant to attack
the Cherokee, and unlike previous attackers, he was very successful,
burning 15 towns, 15,000 acres of corn, and driving (he thought) 5,000
Cherokee into the mountains to starve.
*Despite its bad end, Fort Loudoun did convince the Cherokee to help
the English early in the war, when things were at their worst, and, in
1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the War. John Stuart, almost the
only English officer to treat the Cherokee with respect and to earn
their friendship, was asked by the Cherokee to serve as the English
agent among them, and he did.
*The fall of Fort Loudoun and Pontiac’s Rebellion showed the British
government what trouble the Indians could be, so they issued the
Proclamation of 1763, drawing the Line. To many Americans, this
betrayed everything they had fought for (namely, land in the west).
*Although the Proclamation made it illegal to settle, or even to hunt,
west of the Line (except with special permission from the government
and the Indians), about 1760, Americans began to cross the Appalachians
in increasing numbers. These were the long hunters, so-called
because of the long hunts they undertook as commercial fur trappers who
had learnt to hunt from the Indians. Taking a horse to ride and
another to carry out furs, along with a rifle, powder, and ball, they
might hunt for months or even a year before returning home. These
were the people who would tell others how desirable Tennessee was for
settlement. The most famous of these was Daniel Boone.
*In 1760, Daniel Boone and Nicholas Gist built a small cabin on the
Blue Ridge and went hinting in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee,
and Southwest Virginia. While in what’s now Washington County,
Boone was chased by the Cherokee, who considered him a poacher and
meant to kill him, but hid under a waterfall on what is now called
Boone’s Creek. He also carved his name in a tree: D Boon
cilled a bar on the tree 1760. There is some debate if this is
real or not; in any event, the tree blew down in the early 20th
century, but the DAR saved it and made gavels from it.
*In 1768 or 1769, Boone’s friend, William Bean, who may have hunted
with him, settled with his wife Lydia on one of Boone’s old camp sites,
building a cabin and planting a crop of corn along the Watauga
River. His first cabin was either near modern Elizabethton or
under Boone Lake. In 1769 they had a son, Russell, the first
child born to European parents in Tennessee.
*In 1770, the British and the Cherokee signed the Lochaber Treaty,
which helped define the boundaries of white settlement. According
to this treaty, Virginia extended south to the Holston River
(containing modern Sullivan County, TN), and that area was open to
settlement. However, many westerners misunderstood or creatively
mis-interpreted the treaty to mean that all the west was open to
settlement—or else they did not care about the Proclamation Line in the
first place. Soon more and more settlers came into Tennessee.
*Some of these settlers had been part of the Regulator movementin North
Carolina. This had been a group of western farmers who felt that
their taxes were all being spent by the wealthy elite on the coast,
especially the unpopular and extravagant Governor Tryon. They
also felt that representation in the colonial legislature was not
balanced properly. Consequently, they issued a set of
‘Regulations’ that expressed their grievances and explained how they
felt their part of the country should be run. This let to riots
and conflict in the west, and the Regulators struggled with established
authority (and sometimes abused their own power), until the governor
sent the coastal militia west and crushed them at the Battle of
Alamance in 1771.
*Most of the settlers of East Tennessee came from Virginia or
Pennsylvania down the Great Valley. They initially settled in
four areas (see page 23), most of which were thought to be part of
North Carolina, although no-one knew for sure.
*The oldest of these, along the Wataugua River was called the Watauga
Settlement; among its early leaders were William Bean of Virginia and
James Robertson of North Carolina.
*North of them was the North of Holston Settlement (near modern
Bristol)—its founder was Evan Shelby, who built a station (fortified
store).
*West of that was Carter’s Valley (between modern Kingsport and
Rogersville) named after its principal settler, John Carter, who opened
a store to trade with the Cherokee, although eventually he was forced
to leave, and took his family to Watauga.
*South of the others was the Nolichucky Settlement founded by Jacob Brown along the Nolichucky River (near modern Erwin).
*No-one saw any problems at first, but in 1771 the area was surveyed by
John Donelson of Southwest Virginia and the Indian Agent Alexander
Cameron and Chief Atta-kulla-kulla, and it was discovered that only the
Holston Settlement was considered to be in Virginia, and legal for
settlement under the Lochaber Treaty.
*The other settlers suddenly discovered that they were not part of
North Carolina or Virginia, and Cameron told them they had to
leave. They were not daunted, though.
*The leaders of the other three settlements joined together to form the
Watauga Association. This was the first free, independent, and
democratic white government in North American. Thirteen delegates
were chosen, including Bean, Brown, Carter, James Robertson’s brother
Charles, and John Sevier. They agreed to broadly adopt the laws
of Virginia, and created a five-man commission to administer
them. Then, under their authority, James Roberson arranged for
the Wataugans to lease the land they were occupying from the Indians.
*In 1775, a land speculator from North Carolina, Judge Richard
Henderson, formed the Transylvania Company and contacted the Cherokee
and the Wataugans about purchasing western lands. The Cherokee
(or at least some of them) agreed to sell most of Middle Tennessee and
Kentucky to Henderson for £10,000 in money and trade goods.
*Many Cherokee leaders, especially the younger warriors (especially the
Dragging Canoe, Atta-kulla-kulla’s son), were opposed to the deal, but
Atta-kulla-kulla supported it, and many Cherokee were worried that,
with the colonial revolts in New England, the British might not have
the time to take care of them that they once did.
*Eventually, Henderson talked them into it, and the Transylvania
Purchase was completed on 17 March, 1775 at Sycamore Shoals in modern
Elizabethton. 1,200 Cherokee came to watch.
*Seeing a great opportunity, the leaders of the Wataugans suggested
that they also buy their land from the Cherokee, spending about
£4,200 to do so.
*When the Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Watauga Association
re-organised as the Washington District, and formed a Committee of
Thirteen, with John Carter as its head, to run things during the
emergency.
*Although the British had officially been opposed to the settlement of
East Tennessee before the Revolution, they urged the Cherokee to
restrain themselves. In the spring of 1776, though, they changed
their mind and ordered the Wataugans to leave. They agreed to do
so, if they were given time to prepare. However, they used this
time to build several forts, most notably Fort Caswell on the Sycamore
Shaols, named after governor Richard Caswell.
*On July 5th, 1776, they petitioned North Carolina for annexation,
which was granted. North Carolina even asked them to send
delegates to their new constitutional convention (including Carter,
Sevier, and Charles Robertson) and later (in 1777) to elect members of
the state legislature (again including Senator John Carter and
Representative John Sevier) from Washington County.
*In the meantime, the Cherokee prepared the three-pronged attack on the
settlements. The Raven attacked Carter’s Valley, but the settlers
retreated to Fort Caswell. Dragging Canoe attacked the Long
Island (near Kingsport), but they settlers fought back, and even
wounded Dragging Canoe severely. Old Abram of Chilhowee attacked
Fort Caswell and laid siege to the fort, but were unable to take it.
*When the Cherokee approached the fort, they found Katherine Sherrill
(Bonny Kate) out milking the cows; she fled from them, according to
legend running clear around the fort, until she took a running jump and
leapt for the top, where John Sevier caught her and helped her
over—they would marry four years later.
*During the siege, the Indians tried to burn the fort, but were
repelled when James Robertson’s sister poured boiling water on them
scalding their flesh and putting out their torches.
*Eventually North Carolina and Virginia sent troops to threaten the
Cherokee towns, and the warriors still in the field withdrew to protect
their homes. In 1777 treaties were signed at Fort Patrick Henry
(near Kingsport) ending the war (sometimes called the Second Cherokee
War) officially. Some Indians, particularly the group around
Chattanooga that called themselves the Chickamauga and led by the
Dragging Canoe, did not reconcile themselves to that.
*In the relative peace the followed, Henderson conceived a plan to
settle his new land in Middle Tenenssee. He got James Robertson
and John Donelson to lead an expedition of settlers to the French
Lick.
*Robertson had already been to Middle Tennessee, travelling through the
Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, and down the Cumberland River. He
planned to take a group of about 100 men overland that way.
Donnelson would take the women, children, other men, and the heavier
supplies and float down the Tennessee River, and then pole their
flatboats up the Ohio River and the Cumberland. They all left in
October and November of 1789.
*Everyone expected Robertson to have the hard part, but on Christmas
Day his men walked across the frozen Cumberland River and settled Fort
Nashborough. All made it there safely.
*Donelson’s expedition, with the flagship Adventure, was delayed, and
did not even start until December 1789. They suffered frostbite,
smallpox, Indian attacks (particularly from the Chickamauga), and
dangerous white water rapids around Muscle Shoals. In March 1780
they finally arrived, but many had died, including one of James
Donelson’s daughters, although another one, Rachel, made it, and would
later marry Andrew Jackson.
*Back in Washington County, the British had sent a new threat. In
1780, Lord Cornwallis, commander of the British Army in the south, sent
Patrick Ferguson to harass the mountains of North Carolina. He
sent a message to the western part of the state demanding that the
people in rebellion against the King lay down their arms or he would
march over the mountain, hang their leaders, and lay waste to their
country with fire and sword.
*Isaac Shelby (son of Evan) got the word, and went to John Sevier on
the Nolichucky, where he found him at a jollification. They
agreed to muster all the local militia at Sycamore Shoals. Local
officials also seized crown tax money to buy supplies.
*On 25 September 1780 about 1000 soldiers mustered at Sycamore Shoals,
where they heard a sermon from Samuel Doak before marching over the
mountains to King’s Mountain on the North/South Carolina border. Along
the way, they picked up reinforcements, bringing their numbers to about
1,400.
*On 7 October, the Overmountain Men approached King’s Mountain, to
which Ferguson had retreated with his Loyalist militia (and a few
British regulars). He had about 1,125 men, and after Sevier and
Shelby left men behind to guard the horses and supplies, they
Overmountain Men numbered about 900. After waiting all night in
the pouring rain, they surrounded the mountain, picked men off the bald
top with their long rifles, and charged up the mountain with Sevier at
the forefront.
*In about an hour and fifteen minutes, Ferguson was dead, pierced by
seven bullets, and on the Loyalist side, 225 men were killed, 163 were
wounded and 716 taken prisoner. Of the Overmountain Men, 28 were
killed and 62 wounded.
*This is sometimes known as the turning point of the Revolutionary War
in the South, as it helped prevent the British from recruiting more
Tory militia in the Deep South, the most valuable of all the thirteen
colonies.