After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  Clark was a hero. The U.S. honored him with a stamp in 1929 and a postal card in 1979. Streets, colleges, and counties are named after him. Pursued by creditors for much of his later life, he died in 1818 in his sister’s home near Louisville. But Clark’s younger brother, William, achieved greater fame: He was second in command of the eponymous Lewis and Clark Expedition.

  The Shawnees were discouraged by the Whig invasions and the British inability to stop them. “We see ourselves weak and our arms feeble to the force of the enemy,” a Shawnee chief said. “’Tis now upwards of twenty years since we have been alone engaged against the Virginians.”26

  None of the Indians were pleased with their ally. With peace near, the British not only discouraged raids, but refused to support them. “Your Father can take no part” in such raids, DePeyster told the Shawnees.27

  Still, the attacks continued.

  In early 1783, some forty people were killed or captured on the Pennsylvania frontier alone. “The inhabitants of the frontiers seem more discouraged this spring than they have been, having flattered themselves with the most sanguine hopes of peace, which hopes they now think are frustrated,” said a militia lieutenant.28

  Attacks in Kentucky also continued. One Indian ambush near Louisville in April killed a prominent militia leader, Colonel [James] John Floyd. Floyd was a veteran of Dunmore’s War, Blue Licks, and Clark’s expedition the year before.29

  In May, Simon Girty and some Indians raided settlers near Nine-Mile Run, a creek about five miles east of Fort Pitt, now part of Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Girty’s mother and Whig half-brother, John Turner, lived in the area, and it’s possible Girty visited them while on the raid. Girty and Turner were close, they might have secretly visited each other after the war, and Turner’s will included Girty’s children.30

  Before Girty left Nine-Mile Run to return to Detroit, he captured a boy, John Burkhart. An aging contemporary said years later that as Girty left, he heard cannon firing from Fort Pitt. He asked Burkhart if he knew what the firing was for. Burkhart said the fort was celebrating the peace treaty. Girty didn’t believe him, and kept him as a prisoner, bringing him to Detroit, where DePeyster returned him in the care of another traveler.31

  After the war, Girty was persona non grata in the U.S., where, if captured, he likely would have been executed, if not lynched, for perceived atrocities. He made his home in Amherstburg, Ontario, and fell in love with a nineteen-year-old woman who had been captured in 1780 and adopted by the Shawnees. Girty had four surviving children with her and many grandchildren. The British rewarded him, giving him a half-pay pension, while he continued to work as an agent and interpreter. He remained in touch with his family, giving title of his Pennsylvania lands to his American half-brother, and having a reunion with his mother in Detroit. Around 1796, Girty became depressed and began drinking heavily; his wife left him. His physical health failed: By the time he was seventy, he was lame and nearly blind. After the War of 1812, his wife rejoined him when he gave up drinking. The British honored him at his funeral with a color guard.32

  21. Sevier Hunts for Dragging Canoe

  BY THE TIME OF CORNWALLIS’S YORKTOWN SURRENDER, THE Cherokees in the South already had lost much of their land—a catastrophe for people who lived in more than sixty small towns with communal farms, raising crops and keeping livestock.1

  Between 1759 and 1761, their war against white incursions was quashed by three expeditions whose members included Francis Marion and Henry Laurens. In 1776, Loyalists and Cherokees attacked settlements all along the southern frontier. “I hope that the Cherokees will now be driven beyond the Mississippi,” said Thomas Jefferson, then in Congress. “Our contest with Britain is too serious and too great to permit any possibility of avocation from the Indians.”2

  Jefferson’s wish wouldn’t be fulfilled for half a century. Instead, the result of several expeditions sent into Cherokee country (one of which was led by North Carolina’s general Griffith Rutherford) were two 1776 treaties that forced the Cherokees to cede all their land east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  But what angered many Cherokees more than military defeats was the sale of land by other Cherokees to whites. In March 1775, land speculators, including Boone, had met with Cherokees at Sycamore Shoals in the western foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, two chiefs representing two groups of Cherokees sold 27,000 square miles of land, including Shawnee land—most of Kentucky and part of Tennessee—for ten wagons of goods, liquor, and arms.

  Dragging Canoe (Tsi’yugunsi’ny), a dissenting chief in his 30s, was livid. He warned the speculators that the sale meant “a black cloud hung over the country,” and “it was the bloody ground, and would be dark, and difficult to settle it.” He later explained to the brother of a British Indian agent that the chiefs were “too old to hunt,” and “by their poverty, had been induced to sell their land.” Clearly, said Dragging Canoe, “it seemed the intention of the white people to destroy them [the Cherokees] from being a people.”3

  Dragging Canoe was born in the Nippising nation in Canada around 1738, but Cherokees captured him as an infant and adopted him. He survived smallpox, and his face, like many whites and Indians of the day, was pockmarked. He earned his name as a boy when he singlehandedly dragged a canoe across a portage to accompany a war party. A British official said he was “the only young warrior of note” among the Overhill Cherokees, those who lived in and near the mountains. “He was a man of consequence in his country,” a fellow chief said.4

  After Sycamore Shoals, Dragging Canoe participated in the 1776 Cherokee war against settlers, and during one battle was wounded in both legs. When most Cherokees signed the peace treaties, he led his followers to the Chickamauga Creek area, near present-day Chattanooga, and planned to resist. (He sarcastically called Cherokees who didn’t continue to fight “Virginians.”) He encouraged like-minded Indians to join him, Cherokee or not. What became known as the Chickamaugas was a multiethnic tribe, with an army of about one thousand Cherokees, Shawnees from the Ohio country, Creeks from Georgia, and even whites who had become persona non grata among the Whigs because of loyalties or criminal acts.5

  The Chickamaugas, with British support, began raiding rebels in 1778. In response, the Whigs raided Cherokee and Chickamauga country in 1779, 1780, and 1781, burning farms and towns, including those of peaceful Cherokees. Two expeditions alone had burned fifty thousand bushels of corn and one thousand homes. “Our families were almost destroyed by famine this spring,” said one Cherokee.6

  “The towns of the Cherokees are too much exposed to the incursions of the rebels from the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas,” a British official reported in January 1782. He said the rebels were trying to persuade Cherokees and Creeks to turn against the British. “The rebels and Spaniards spare no pains to excite the Indians to abandon us and take up the hatchet against us.” Four months later, he described a desperate situation: “The wanton bloody outrages therein mentioned, committed by the rebels on such unfortunate Indian women and children as have fallen during the course of the war into their hands, have been truly barbarous and more than savage.”7

  Neutral Cherokees complained to Whig North Carolina governor Alexander Martin. “We are a poor, distressed people, in great trouble,” said Chief Old Tassel (Utsi’dsata). “Your people . . . are daily pushing us out of our lands. We have no place to hunt. Your people have built houses within one day’s walk of our towns. . . . We are the first people that ever lived on this land. It is ours, and why will our elder brother take it from us?” Martin also heard from a sympathetic Virginia governor Harrison: “Indians have their rights, and our justice is called on to support them. Whilst we are nobly contending for liberty, will it not be an eternal blot on our national character if we deprive others of it who ought to be as free as ourselves?”8

  In February 1782, Martin ordered his leading frontier militia colonel to stop white invasions into the territory of peaceful Che
rokees. “I am distressed with the repeated complaints of the Indians respecting the daily incursions of our people on their lands . . . I beg you, sir, to prevent the injuries these savages justly complain of, who are constantly imploring the protection of the State, and appealing to its justice in vain.” If the colonel was unable to persuade the settlers to leave voluntarily, he was authorized to raze their cabins and drive them off.9

  The colonel was John Sevier. Driving away illegal settlers wasn’t in John Sevier’s plans.

  The Over Mountain men—frontier settlers like Sevier who lived beyond the Appalachians, beyond the Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia low country—were far from the aristocratic plantation owners in geography, demeanor, background, religion, and wealth. Charles Woodmason, a Charlestown planter, merchant, and Anglican evangelist traveled the region in 1768. He described the settlers with contempt:

  “Their ignorance and impudence is so very high, as to be past bearing. Very few can read; fewer write. . . . They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life, and seem not desirous of changing it. . . . Hence their many vices—their gross licentiousness, wantonness, lasciviousness, rudeness, lewdness, and profligacy—they will commit the grossest enormities before my face, and laugh at all admonition.

  “They were as rude in their manners as the common savages, and hardly a degree removed from them. Their dresses almost as loose and naked as the Indians, and differing in nothing save complexion.”10

  Colonel Isaac Shelby, a future Kentucky governor who led Over Mountain men in battle, had a different perspective: “These mountaineers were poor men who lived by keeping stock on the range beyond the mountains; they were volunteers and neither expected or received any compensation except liquidated certificates worth two shillings in the pound.”11

  With the revolution, most Over Mountain men opposed the British, if only because the British tried to enforce the 1763 boundary between whites and Indians. Their most important war contribution was to defeat—in some cases, executing prisoners—an army of British and Loyalists at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, in 1780. The victory gave Greene time to rebuild the Continental army in the South. Shelby was one of the militia commanders; the other was Colonel John Sevier, 38.

  Sevier’s son remembered his father as about five feet nine, one hundred ninety pounds with a “long face, small deep blue eyes, aquiline nose, fair complexion, fair hair.” He wasn’t religious, but once donated land for a Baptist church; hired Presbyterian ministers to teach his children; attended a Catholic church at least twelve times; and even tolerated Quakers. He was “with all people an object of attention and a depository of their confidence.” Moreover, said a trader who knew him, “John Sevier was a very handsome man, probably the handsomest in the state. He had a noble bearing, really military, although very conciliating, without haughtiness. . . . He knew how to get along with people better than any man I knew.”12

  As a military man, Sevier was “the best Indian fighter on the border,” said Theodore Roosevelt, a historian before he became president. Sevier had a far better record than Clark of killing more Indians and Tories with fewer losses. “He moved with extreme rapidity and attacked with instantaneous suddenness, using ambushes and surprises wherever practicable,” Roosevelt said. “Still, he never struck a crushing blow, nor conquered a permanent peace.” Nonetheless, he ended up fighting thirty-five battles during his lifetime, all of them victories.13

  Sevier was born in the hills of western Virginia. As a boy, he worked as a clerk in his father’s general store, and he married at seventeen. He supported his family by farming, buying and selling land, and running a store. Around 1770, he moved to the western side of the mountains, on Cherokee land, and was a captain during Dunmore’s War. In the revolution’s early years, he defended against Indian attacks and participated in an invasion of Indian country. Recognizing his growing influence among the settlers, he was named a county clerk and district judge, and in 1778, was elected colonel of his county militia. During the war’s middle years, he and the militia were active in intimidating Tories.

  Soon after King’s Mountain, Sevier led a month-long campaign against the Cherokees, defeating them in battle and burning their towns. In negotiating peace terms, he told the Cherokees, “I never hated you as a people, nor warred with you on that account. I own I fought with you, but it was for our own safety, and not from any delight I had in hurting you.”14

  At Greene’s request, Sevier crossed the mountains in September 1781 with about five hundred mounted riflemen and joined forces with Marion. In South Carolina, they persuaded a British garrison to surrender without a shot by threatening that any resistance would result in another King’s Mountain. By the start of 1782, Sevier and his men were back on the frontier.

  With the Chickamaugas and others continuing to attack settlements—“they committed many murders that season with impunity”—and with his own pro-settler sentiments, Sevier ignored Governor Martin’s orders to stop white incursions on Indian land. In mid-summer, however, the state authorized Sevier to act against the Indians. The frontier militia attacked in September. From the south, militia general Andrew Pickens with three hundred South Carolina and one hundred Georgia troops burned Indian towns and crops in the Chattahoochee River Valley in northern Georgia. An ensuing treaty resulted in more land cessions. Sevier aimed his attack at Dragging Canoe and the Chickamaugas over the protest of Virginia general and Indian agent Joseph Martin. The Chickamauguas, Martin said, had returned all but three of the prisoners they held. “I believe that never were people more desirous of peace than the Cherokees, but I hear the forces from this state are now starting. I shall set off this evening to see Colonel Sevier.”15

  It was too late. With about two hundred fifty men, Sevier invaded Chickamauga country. The Chickamaugas had time to abandon their towns, but Sevier destroyed their homes and recently harvested food supplies—“all their stock, corn, and provisions of every kind,” Sevier’s son James, a major, said. “The Indians eluded our march and kept out of the way in general, although a few men and women and children were surprised and taken.” Some Cherokees, but not Dragging Canoe, agreed in October to peace and a prisoner release. “Thus ended the war of 1782. We all set out for our homes without the loss of a single man.”16

  Dragging Canoe abandoned the former town sites and moved the Chickamaugas twenty miles west, where they established a new home, Running Water Town, near present-day Jasper, Tennessee. The revolution ended soon, but Chickamauga resistance continued. With Spanish supplies, he began raiding settlements again in 1784. When, in 1788, settlers murdered a Cherokee chief who was under a flag of truce, more Indians joined the Chickamauguas, who defeated a militia army. In 1791, Dragging Canoe commanded seven hundred Chickamaugas, three hundred fifty Creeks, and one hundred Shawnees, who joined northern Indians to defeat an invading American army in Indiana. He continued to build alliances. In 1792, after an all-night celebration of a new alliance and successful raid against settlers, he suddenly died. Two years later, the Chickamaugas, finally defeated by a militia army, agreed to peace with the whites in exchange for permission to continue living in their villages.17

  Sevier turned his military career into a political one. After the war, the Over Mountain settlers became increasingly hostile to North Carolina. They seceded from North Carolina in 1784, formed their own state, Franklin, and elected Sevier its first governor. To North Carolina, this was treason; its militia arrested Sevier and seized his slaves. With friends’ help, Sevier escaped. Franklin was doomed, but North Carolina ceded the territory to the federal government. It became the state of Tennessee in 1796. Sevier was its first governor, serving six two-year terms. Like Hugh McGary, Sevier had a run-in with future president Andrew Jackson. Jackson perceived a Sevier comment as a slur on his wife, and challenged him to a duel. Mutual friends intervened to separate the two. After serving as governor, Tennesseans elected Sevier to Congress. While serving as a commissioner to determine the Geor
gia–Creek Nation boundary, he contracted a fever and died near Fort Decatur, Arkansas. He is buried on the grounds of the Old Knox County Courthouse, in downtown Knoxville.

  22. Arkansas Post and the Spanish Frontier

  LIKE THE MOHAWKS IN THE NORTH, THE CHICKASAW NATION east of the Mississippi River opposite Arkansas had long aligned their self-interests with the British. They fought Spanish explorers as early as 1540, then the French and their Choctaw allies in the Seven Years’ War in 1763. During Dunmore’s War, the Chickasaws stayed neutral, to British approval.1

  The British, in turn, supplied the Chickasaws with modern firearms. The Chickasaws used the arms to raid other tribes—often, the French-allied Quapaws across the Mississippi and along the Arkansas River. They adopted Quapaw captives as their own, and supplied them to the British as slaves. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, the Chickasaws reached an accommodation, if not a military and trade alliance, with the Quapaws.2

  It was astute diplomacy, because the European peace treaty superimposed a new power on Indian land in the Mississippi Valley to replace the French: Spain. From St. Louis to New Orleans, nearly seven hundred miles, the Spanish now manned scattered posts along the western side of the river. Spain governed gently. Many of the mostly French, French Creoles, and French-Canadian settlers joined the Spanish army, and some served as high-ranking officers.