The Winning of the American West. Theodore Roosevelt
The vast herds of cattle and great rice plantations of the south offered a tempting bait to every foe. Tories were numerous in the population, while there were incessant bickerings with the Creeks, frequently resulting in small local wars, brought on as often by the faithlessness and brutality of the white borderers as by the treachery and cruelty of the red. Indeed the Indians were only kept quiet by presents, it being an unhappy feature of the frontier troubles that while lawless whites could not be prevented from encroaching on the Indian lands, the Indians, in turn could only be kept at peace with the law-abiding by being bribed.433
Only a small number of warriors invaded Georgia. Nevertheless they greatly harassed the settlers, capturing several families and fighting two or three skirmishes with varying results.434 By the middle of July Col. Samuel Jack435 took the field with a force of two hundred rangers, all young men, the old and infirm being left to guard the forts. The Indians fled as soon as he had embodied his troops, and towards the end of the month he marched against one or two of their small lower towns, which he burned, destroying the grain and driving off the cattle. No resistance was offered, and he did not lose a man.
The heaviest blow fell on South Carolina, where the Cherokees were led by Cameron himself, accompanied by most of his tories. Some of his warriors came from the lower towns that lay along the Tugelou and Keowee, but most were from the middle towns, in the neighborhood of the Tellico, and from the valley towns that lay well to the westward of these, among the mountains, along the branches of the Hiawassee and Chattahoochee rivers. Falling furiously on the scattered settlers, they killed them or drove them into the wooden forts, ravaging, burning, and murdering as elsewhere, and sparing neither age nor sex. Col. Andrew Williamson was in command of the western districts, and he at once began to gather together a force, taking his station at Picken's Fort, with forty men, on July 3d.436 It was with the utmost difficulty that he could get troops, guns, or ammunition; but his strenuous and unceasing efforts were successful, and his force increased day by day. It is worth noting that these lowland troops were for the most part armed with smoothbores, unlike the rifle-bearing mountaineers. As soon as he could muster a couple of hundred men437 he left the fort and advanced towards the Indians, making continual halts,438 so as to allow the numerous volunteers that were flocking to his standard to reach him. At the same time the Americans were much encouraged by the repulse of an assault made just before daylight on one of the forts.439 The attacking party was some two hundred strong, half of them being white men, naked and painted like the Indians; but after dark, on the evening before the attack, a band of one hundred and fifty American militia, on their way to join Williamson, entered the fort. The assault was made before dawn; it was promptly repulsed, and at daybreak the enemy fled, having suffered some loss; thirteen of the tories were captured, but the more nimble Indians escaped.
By the end of July, Williamson had gathered over eleven hundred militia440 (including two small rifle companies), and advanced against the Indian towns, sending his spies and scouts before him. On the last day of the month he made a rapid night march, with three hundred and fifty horsemen, to surprise Cameron, who lay with a party of tories and Indians, encamped at Oconoree Creek, beyond the Cherokee town of Eseneka, which commanded the ford of the river Keowee. The cabins and fenced gardens of the town lay on both sides of the river. Williamson had been told by his prisoners that the hither bank was deserted, and advanced heedlessly, without scouts or flankers. In consequence he fell into an ambush, for when he reached the first houses, hidden Indians suddenly fired on him from front and flank. Many horses, including that of the commander, were shot down, and the startled troops began a disorderly retreat, firing at random. Col. Hammond rallied about twenty of the coolest, and ordering them to reserve their fire, he charged the fence from behind which the heaviest hostile fire came. When up to it, they shot into the dark figures crouching behind it, and jumping over charged home. The Indians immediately fled, leaving one dead and three wounded in the hands of the whites. The action was over; but the by-no-means-reassured victors had lost five men mortally and thirteen severely wounded, and were still rather nervous. At daybreak Williamson destroyed the houses near by, and started to cross the ford. But his men, in true militia style, had become sulky and mutinous, and refused to cross, until Col. Hammond swore he would go alone, and plunged into the river, followed by three volunteers, whereupon the whole army crowded after. The revulsions in their feelings was instantaneous; once across they seemed to have left all fear as well as all prudence behind. On the hither side there had been no getting them to advance; on the farther there was no keeping them together, and they scattered everywhere. Luckily the Indians were too few to retaliate; and besides the Cherokees were not good marksmen, using so little powder in their guns that they made very ineffective weapons. After all the houses had been burned, and some six thousand bushels of corn, besides peas and beans, destroyed, Williamson returned to his camp. Next day he renewed his advance, and sent out detachments against all the other lower towns, utterly destroying every one by the middle of August, although not without one or two smart skirmishes.441 His troops were very much elated, and only the lack of provisions prevented his marching against the middle towns. As it was, he retired to refit, leaving a garrison of six hundred men at Eseneka, which he christened Fort Rutledge. This ended the first stage of the retaliatory campaign, undertaken by the whites in revenge for the outbreak. The South Carolinians, assisted slightly by a small independent command of Georgians, who acted separately, had destroyed the lower Cherokee towns, at the same time that the Watauga people repulsed the attack of the Overhill warriors.
The second and most important movement was to be made by South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia jointly, each sending a column of two thousand men,442 the two former against the middle and valley, the latter against the Overhill towns. If the columns acted together the Cherokees would be overwhelmed by a force three times the number of all their warriors. The plan succeeded well, although the Virginia division was delayed so that its action, though no less effective, was much later than that of the others, and though the latter likewise failed to act in perfect unison.
Rutherford and his North Carolinians were the first to take the field.443 He had an army of two thousand gunmen, besides pack-horsemen and men to tend the drove of bullocks, together with a few Catawba Indians,—a total of twenty-four hundred.444 On September 1st he left the head of the Catawba,445 and the route he followed was long known by the name of Rutherford's trace. There was not a tent in his army, and but very few blankets; the pack-horses earned the flour, while the beef was driven along on the hoof. Officers and men alike wore homespun hunting-shirts trimmed with colored cotton; the cloth was made from hemp, tow, and wild-nettle bark.
He passed over the Blue Ridge at Swananoa Gap, crossed the French Broad at the Warriors' Ford, and then went through the mountains446 to the middle towns, a detachment of a thousand men making a forced march in advance. This detachment was fired at by a small band of Indians from an ambush, and one man was wounded in the foot; but no further resistance was made, the towns being abandoned.447 The main body coming up, parties of troops were sent out in every direction, and all of the middle towns were destroyed. Rutherford had expected to meet Williamson at this place, but the latter did not appear, and so the North Carolina commander determined to proceed alone against the valley towns along the Hiawassee. Taking with him only nine hundred picked men, he attempted to cross the rugged mountain chains which separated him from his destination; but he had no guide, and missed the regular pass—a fortunate thing for him, as it afterwards turned out, for he thus escaped falling into an ambush of five hundred Cherokees who were encamped along it.448 After in vain trying to penetrate the tangle of gloomy defiles and wooded peaks, he returned to the middle towns at Canucca on September 18th. Here he met Williamson, who had just arrived, having been delayed so that he could not leave Fort Rutledge until the 13th.449 The South Carolinians, two thousand strong, had crossed the Blue Ridge near the sources of the Little Tennessee.
While Rutherford rested450 Williamson, on the 19th, pushed on through Noewee pass, and fell into the ambush which had been laid for the former. The pass was a narrow, open valley, walled in by steep and lofty mountains. The Indians waited until the troops were struggling up to the outlet, and then assailed them with a close and deadly fire. The surprised soldiers recoiled and fell into confusion; and they were for the second time saved from disaster by the gallantry of Colonel Hammond, who with voice and action rallied them, endeavoring to keep them firm while a detachment was sent to clamber up the rocks and outflank the Indians. At the same time Lieutenant Hampton got twenty men together,