Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground. Constance Lindsay Skinner
small holdings on the land under the sway of their chief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood and fealty but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Head of the Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold enough to step forward into that position until he had performed some deed of worth. They were principally herders, their chief stock being the famous small black cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with each other were cattle raids. Only in war, however, did the Gael lay hands on his neighbor's goods. There were no highwaymen and housebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland mansion, cot, or barn was ever locked. Theft and the breaking of an oath, sins against man's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no one guilty of them could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens. These Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply and frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all weathers, with no other covering from rain and snow than their plaidies. It is reported of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading his clan to war in winter time, that his men were divided as to the propriety of following him further because he rolled a snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down. “Now we despair of victory,” they said, “since our leader has become so effeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!” ¹
¹ MacLean, An Historical Account of the Settlement of Scotch Highlanders in America.
The “King's glorious victory of Culloden” was followed by a policy of extermination carried on by the orders and under the personal direction of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at last restrained his son from his orgy of blood, he offered the Gaels their lives and exile to America on condition of their taking the full oath of allegiance. The majority accepted his terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but their crops and cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which their ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the hills and glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among the most pathetic in history. Strong men who had met the ravage of a brutal sword without weakening abandoned themselves to the agony of sorrow. They kissed the walls of their houses. They flung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead.
Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the wilderness about the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition indicates that these hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which overgrew the inner country stretching towards the mountains provided excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to have brought with them. These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years earlier. In 1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of Gaels to rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from his residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some of these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite with others of their clan who had been for some time in that district. The exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin cannot be ascertained, as there were no court records and the offices of the land companies were not then open for the sale of these remote regions. But by 1753 there were not less than four thousand Gaels in Cumberland County, where they occupied the chief magisterial posts; and they were already spreading over the lands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond, Robeson, Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was as commonly heard as English.
In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in 1776 itself they came in increasing numbers. They knew nothing of the smoldering fire just about to break into flames in the country of their choice, but the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin, knew that Highland arms would soon be needed by His Majesty. He knew something of Highland honor, too; for he would not let the Gaels proceed after their landing until they had bound themselves by oath to support the Government of King George. So it was that the unfortunate Highlanders found themselves, according to their strict code of honor, forced to wield arms against the very Americans who had received and befriended them—and for the crowned brother of a prince whose name is execrated to this day in Highland song and story!
They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and tradition gives us a stirring picture of Allan's wife—the famous Flora MacDonald, who in Scotland had protected the Young Pretender in his flight—making an impassioned address in Gaelic to the Highland soldiers and urging them on to die for honor's sake. When this Highland force was conquered by the Americans, the large majority willingly bound themselves not to fight further against the American cause and were set at liberty. Many of them felt that, by offering their lives to the swords of the Americans, they had canceled their obligation to King George and were now free to draw their swords again and, this time, in accordance with their sympathies; so they went over to the American side and fought gallantly for independence.
Although the brave glory of this pioneer age shines so brightly on the Lion Rampant of Caledonia, not to Scots alone does that whole glory belong. The second largest racial stream which flowed into the Back Country of Virginia and North Carolina was German. Most of these Germans went down from Pennsylvania and were generally called “Pennsylvania Dutch,” an incorrect rendering of Pennsylvänische Deutsche. The upper Shenandoah Valley was settled almost entirely by Germans. They were members of the Lutheran, German Reformed, and Moravian churches. The cause which sent vast numbers of this sturdy people across the ocean, during the first years of the eighteenth century, was religious persecution. By statute and by sword the Roman Catholic powers of Austria sought to wipe out the Salzburg Lutherans and the Moravian followers of John Huss. In that region of the Rhine country known in those days as the German Palatinate, now a part of Bavaria, Protestants were being massacred by the troops of Louis of France, then engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) and in the zealous effort to extirpate heretics from the soil of Europe. In 1708, by proclamation, Good Queen Anne offered protection to the persecuted Palatines and invited them to her dominions. Twelve thousand of them went to England, where they were warmly received by the English. But it was no slight task to settle twelve thousand immigrants of an alien speech in England and enable them to become independent and self-supporting. A better solution of their problem lay in the Western World. The Germans needed homes and the Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They were settled at first along the Hudson, and eventually many of them took up lands in the fertile valley of the Mohawk.
For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants poured into America. In Pennsylvania their influx averaged about fifteen hundred a year, and that colony became the distributing center for the German race in America. By 1727, Adam Müller and his little company had established the first white settlement in the Valley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist Heydt went south from York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan Creek at or near the site of the present city of Winchester.
The life of Count Zinzendorf, called “the Apostle,” one of the leaders of the Moravian immigrants, glows like a star out of those dark and troublous times. Of high birth and gentle nurture, he forsook whatever of ease his station promised him and fitted himself for evangelical work. In 1741 he visited the Wyoming Valley to bring his religion to the Delawares and Shawanoes. He was not of those picturesque Captains of the Lord who bore their muskets on their shoulders when they went forth to preach. Armored only with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, his feet “shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace,” he went out into the country of these bloodthirsty tribes and told them that he had come to them in their darkness to teach the love of the Christ which lighteth the world. The Indians received him suspiciously. One day while he sat in his tent writing, some Delawares drew near to slay him and were about to strike when they saw two deadly snakes crawl in from the opposite side of the tent, move directly towards the Apostle, and pass harmlessly over his body. Thereafter they regarded him as under spiritual protection. Indeed so widespread was his good fame among the tribes that for some years all Moravian settlements along the borders were unmolested. Painted savages passed through on their way to war with enemy bands or to raid the border, but for the sake of one consecrated spirit, whom they had seen death avoid, they spared the lives and goods of his fellow