Late in the seventeenth century Mennonites, Amish, and German Brethren arrived in Pennsylvania, attired in somber colors, with no ruffles, and few buttons or buckles. They were as plain as Quakers; and, like orthodox Quakers, they refused to swear oaths, preferring instead to make affirmation. What marked them as different was their communalism and aloofness. In Europe their refusal to abide by any laws other than the teachings of the New Testament provoked hostility from civil and ecclesiastical authority, but won the admiration of William Penn, and a place in his "holy experiment" on the Delaware.
The inner light of the Friends dimmed, however, when it became clear the newcomers didn't intend to blend in. Their reluctance to learn English stirred xenophobia even in so-called enlightened men like Franklin. Few English differentiated between Swiss, Palatines, or Alsatians. To unsophisticated Britons anyone unable to speak English or who spoke it with non-British accents was immediately labeled "Deutsch" or plain "Dutch." Such bigotry only confirmed these immigrants' belief that all earthly government was illegitimate, and turned their eyes to the frontier where woods-faring Finns and Swedes tended hills of Indian corn among the stumps around their log homes, and shot their half-wild hogs like game in the woods.
Strangest of the pacifists were the Seventh Day Baptists or Dunkards, who segregated themselves into male and female cloisters and a society of couples who weren't ready for the joys of abstinence. Shaving was considered sinful, and the men cut a striking figure with their long beards and flowing robes designed to hide the contours of the body. Most shocking, however, was the Dunkards' candid admission that everything they believed true today might be revealed as false tomorrow. They were ruled not by doctrine but by the spirit, and spoke not from texts but inspiration.
These spontaneous outpourings of spirit later characterized most frontier religion, as minister Philip Fithian discovered in 1775 when he preached to "New Light" Presbyterians on Cedar Creek in Frederick County, Va. Perhaps not coincidentally, the church where Fithian preached was located only a few miles west of Ezechiel Sangmeister's Dunkard commune that flourished at Sandy Hook from 1752 to 1764. "Preach without Papers," Fithian wrote, and "Both your hands will be seized & almost shook off ... Read your Sermons [and] their Backs will be up at once, their Attention all gone." This type of inspirational theology of course led to disagreements, and dissidents like Sangmeister occasionally splintered off from the Ephrata commune to settle other parts of the frontier.
In 1717 large numbers of Lutherans began arriving from the Rhineland Palatinate. Many were bond slaves who signed indenture articles before shipping out of Rotterdam. Others were middle class immigrants to whom ships' captains sold stores at ungodly mark-ups, then sold debtors on the dock in Philadelphia to collect what they were owed.
Other Palatines entered Pennsylvania through the back door. In 1723 thirty-three families—refugees from the religious wars in Europe—marched south from their homes on Schoharie Creek in upstate New York. They stopped on the Susquehanna River to make rafts and canoes for the convenience of the women, and drove their livestock deep into Pennsylvania. When they reached the Irish settlements of Donegal Township they turned east and settled among fellow Germans on Tulpehocken Creek. One settler who entered Pennsylvania via the northern route was John Leonhardt Holsteiner, whose son drifted to southwest Virginia where, as Michael Stoner, he began a lifelong friendship with Daniel Boone.
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| Pictured at the top is a jaeger rifle made by Andreas Staarman in late seventeenth century Berlin. It has a 26 inch barrel and .75 caliber bore. Next is a New World hybrid owned by Pennsylvanian Edward Marshall in 1737. Like the jaeger, it has a patch box with a sliding wooden cover. At the bottom is an early example of a fully evolved American long rifle. It's 44.5 inch barrel made it more accurate, and its .44 caliber bore made it more efficient in its use of lead and powder, than the heavy jaeger. |
In 1710 the Swiss came to Pequea Creek in present Lancaster County. Like Finns and Swedes, these Swiss were woods-faring people with their own Alpine log cabin tradition; but more significant, their rifled guns fired a spinning projectile that pierced the wind with a minimum of drift. The prodigious range of these jaeger rifles made it possible even for inept woodsmen to survive upon game until corn was ready for gathering. Nevertheless, in a country where powder and lead were precious, German-Swiss gunsmiths in the 1720s transformed the heavy, old-world jaeger into a slender American weapon with a longer barrel to improve accuracy, and a smaller bore to conserve lead and powder, enabling Germans to stay for longer stretches in the woods. Aided by rifled firelocks, settlers who once were content to move only a short distance from the nearest market town now crossed hundreds of miles of wilderness before cutting cabin logs.
In 1727 Adam and Barbara Koger Mueller came from Lancaster County, Pa. and built a cabin on the South Fork of the Shenandoah in present Page County, Va., just within the bounds of a grant later determined to belong to Thomas Lord Fairfax. In 1741 Mueller moved out of the Fairfax grant, and in 1764 he moved again to Elk Run at the foot of Massanutten Mountain where his "new house [was] a-building ...," a two story, four room, log house located a mile north of present Elkton where it stands today, weatherboarded and painted, a residence on a working farm. Miller called the new place Green Meadows. It was "to have a garden, two cows and a horse."
Mueller sold his old place to his son-in-law Jacob Bear. In return, Bear agreed to pay "during Adam's life yearly 25 bushels of wheat ground, 10 bushels of barley, 33 gallons of whiskey, 400 weight of meat, 1/2 of pork and 1/2 of beef; [and] 1/3 of [the] orchard or profits of it."
In 1729 Jacob Stover—an ordinary Swiss farmer who had lived twenty years in the Pennsylvania backwoods—joined Mueller with nine families, most of them Swiss Mennonites. He sold them land on the south fork of Shenandoah, but neglected to tell them it wasn't his yet. In 1730, with his entry for a grant of five thousand acres pending before the Virginia Council, Stover sailed to England to lay an even more ambitious plan before the Lords of Trade and Plantations. He told them what they already knew too well, that the British "had not yet been able to extend ... Settlements beyond the great Ridge of Mountains," an area fast becoming the domain of "French Traders from Canada." But Stover was a woodsman who had "spent three Months" alone in the wilderness "behind the Mountains" evaluating land for an independent colony on "the Backside of Virginia," which he projected as a two hundred-mile-wide strip of territory from the Blue Ridge to the Mississippi.
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| Sketch of a house built in 1758 by Abraham, son of Jacob Strickler, in Egypt bend of the south fork of Shenandoah. Houses of this type, built over vaulted, stone cellars, and sometimes over a spring, were places where the pacifist Mennonites could literally go underground rather than fight Indians in the French War. |
He and South Fork settlers like Abraham Strickler, a German Mennonite with ancestral roots in Switzerland, a hunter and Indian trader who, when he died in 1746, had "25 deer skins" and the rifle he used to kill the deer, would do what tidewater Virginians had thus far failed to do: settle beyond the mountains at no "Charge to the Government, [and] notwithstanding the great difficulties that attend it." Native Virginians were hindered from performing such a feat, Stover argued, not only by "the difficulty of the Passage [but by their] apprehensions of being so farr seperated from Virginia by the Mountains ... And for Security against the Indians, wee will purchase land and friendship of them ... whereby they will not only be peaceable Neighbours but assist us against any distant Indians that may be induced to disturb us in our Settlement."
Stover enlisted the aid of Sir William Keith, one-time Governor of Pennsylvania who was known and respected by both Pennsylvania Germans and Indians. He agreed the land should be given to Stover, who was "of a low degree in life," and therefore likely to offer potential settlers "easier Terms than ... Persons of overgrown Estates." This fact didn't help the cause of William Beverly, a Northern Neck planter vying with Stover for the "old field, called ... Massanutting Town." In April of 1732 Beverly wrote to Gooch, "I am persuaded that I can get a number of people from Pensilvania to settle on Shenondore ... for ye northern men are fond of buying land there and they don't care to go as far as [Williamsburg]."
Stover didn't get approval for his colony. Instead, the governor doubled his grant to ten thousand acres. But there was no land rush. In 1733 there were only "fifty one people old & young" divided among the original nine families strung out along the South Fork. A story circulated that Stover was so desperate to secure a patent he gave "human names to every horse, cow, hog and dog he owned ... which he represented as heads of families, ready to migrate and settle ..."
The two-legged settlers of Shenandoah, worried that William Beverly would prevail in a law suit against Stover, and worried that Stover "being very poor [was] Daily Expected to Run away," petitioned the governor to consider their plight. They explained how they had sold "all their lands & sevll other things in the County of Lancaster & Province of Pensylvania," and paid "Upwards of four hundred pounds [for] the sd: land (known by the name of Massannutting) ... above two hundred miles [from their former homes] & at a time when there was very few Inhabitants in them parts of Shenando, & they frequently visited by the Indians."
But Stover didn't run away. In 1735 he sold fifteen hundred acres to George Boone—a kinsman of Daniel's—whose name is perpetuated in Boone's Run that flows into the South Fork below Elkton. In 1741 Stover died at his home on the South Fork.
Some of these settlers of "Massanutting" reared houses of huge dove-tailed logs, with narrow windows and large central chimneys whose fireplace walls had holes for inserting sticks of resinous fat pine that flared brilliantly above the dim flicker of hickory and ash. Such houses may have doubled as forts. However, narrow openings that peered through stone foundations were not rifle ports, as believed by local antiquarians, but vents that allowed air to circulate through vaulted cellars.
Within a few years other Germans followed Stover into the Valley. In the spring of 1732 an Alsatian, Hans Jost Heydt from Shippack Creek in Pennsylvania, his grown sons, his sons-in-law, a few neighbors and their families, stowed their moveable property into the long, ship-like beds, and under the canvas-tops of wagons called Conestogas because traders used them to haul goods to Conestoga Creek for the Indian trade, and started for country south of the Potomac. Drivers mounted on the wheel horses guided their land craft around stumps and over the rocks and wind-fallen timber that littered the road through the forest. Everyone else either rode their own mounts or helped with the livestock.
They were bound for pasture-land northwest of Massanutten Mountain, and two grants totaling forty thousand acres that Heydt had bought from brothers John and Isaac Van Meter, old neighbors from Esopus in the Hudson valley where the Heydts lived before moving to Pennsylvania in 1716. By 1731 the Van Meters had likewise relocated to the Delaware valley. In that year Isaac Van Meter of Salem County, N. J. sold Heydt ten thousand acres because he coveted only a small section of land on the South Branch of the Potomac where he settled about 1740. John Van Meter of Monocacy Creek in Maryland sold Heydt thirty thousand before moving to a homestead on Rockymarsh Run, west of the Blue Ridge.
John Van Meter had promised Governor Gooch he would seed his land with "Relations and Friends living in the Government of New York." If Heydt could now perform what John Van Meter promised, and plant the standard one family per thousand acres, he could claim the land outright. It mattered little to Virginia's governor, or to the man the British called Joist Hite, if his claim overlapped another by Thomas Lord Fairfax. Details could be worked out later. Gooch was happy to have a few more bodies between the tidewater and the French, and Hite because he got one thousand acres for every homestead he sold no matter how small. The cost of surveys and patents Hite passed along in the three pounds per hundred acres he charged the home-seekers.
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| The Germans of Pennsylvania developed the Conestoga wagon for hauling freight. It got its name in the first quarter of the eighteenth century when traders used these wagons to haul goods to Conestoga Creek for the Indian trade. |
Hite's journey through present York County, Pa. must have been at least as difficult as Moravian Leonhardt Grubb's journey 1753 when the road from Bethlehem to the Susquehanna was dotted with taverns and smithies. East of the Susquehanna Grubb had a blacksmith narrow his wagon three inches from hub to hub. Nevertheless, a dead tree fell "between the horses on the wagon tongue, [knocked off] a piece of a [horse] collar," but didn't injure "[t]he brother, who rode on the horses." West of Harris' Ferry they met travelers whose wagon had been broken fording the shallow river. It was necessary sometimes to help the horses by pushing. And "it took much work to ascend the [South bank of the Potomac]," after which "the way [became] very stony."
Hite stopped on Opequon Creek, eight miles south of present day Winchester, and just off the Great Road. All of his sons-in-law raised cabins close by: Jacob Chrisman at the head spring of Stephen's Creek, Paul Frohman eight miles up Cedar creek at the foot of Little North Mountain, and George Bowman just north of Strasburg where the Bowmans earned a reputation for breeding and riding splendid horses. But there was no Strasburg in 1732, and no Winchester, no settlement closer than two hundred miles where they could buy "Provisions" and "Necessaries."
With some pains Hite might have built a tolerably comfortable cabin. But a man with big plans wasn't likely to waste time improving what was only a temporary shelter. Round logs, a dirt floor, and a smoke hole would do until he and his servants and slaves hewed and dove-tailed logs, plastered the cracks between with mud and straw, and laid stone under the floor boards for a cellar, and raised a chimney through the middle of the house with "a very wide fire-place" on one side for cooking, and a small dried-clay "stove" on the other to heat the room where the family ate and slept.
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| A hewn log cabin with a nail-and-shingle roof, on the estate of Conrad Weiser, Tulpehocken Creek, Womelsdorf, Pa. |
Settlers less ambitious than Hite lived years with the earth for a floor but left ground logs wide enough to eventually lay sleepers (floor beams) to support half-log puncheons. They raised wall logs before hewing the sides flush with hand adzes, and laid roof boards atop the purlins, and weight-poles on top of the boards to hold them in place. Cross pieces called "knees" separated the poles and kept them from rolling down the shallow pitch of the roof. Such a roof might come in handy if it needed to be knocked off from inside because it had caught fire. Samuel Kercheval recalled that as late as the 1780s cabins "were pretty generally in use ..." A German settler, he said, "was sure to erect a fine large barn, before he built any other dwelling-houses than his rude log cabin."
They turned their rifles on bear, deer, elk, and on the bison that thundered through the grass from Buffalo Lick Run to the pea-vine and timber on Hunting Ridge. They declared war on the wolves and panthers who preyed on wild and tame herds. They used game trails as roads, and blazed new ones to the springs and salt licks. "Niswanger's Hunting Path" was named for Christian Niswanger, whose widow Hite married when his first wife died.
In 1743 Moravian Bernhardt Schnell stopped at Hite's to enquire the best way to Carolina. He described his host as "a rich man, well known in this region." Indeed, Hite's grist mill—built in 1738—meant relief to settlers who used to pound corn like Indians, or hand milled it between bed and runner stones in hollow stumps. His log house was also an informal hostelry to both Indians and whites traveling between Pennsylvania and Carolina. Hite was doing so well in fact that about this time he moved out of his old log house into a stone dwelling, and by doing so started a trend.
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| Panthers were night hunters more often heard than seen. Backwoodsmen said their cries were like the screams of a woman. In 1775 a man alone at night in the new settlement of Abb's Valley thought he heard someone call his name. "He answered, and the call was repeated." He lighted "some pieces of split pine," went out to investigate, and came to within a few yards of a panther that gave "a wild terrific scream" and bounded away when he uncovered his light. |
For twenty years Hite's sons-in-law lived in cabins and hewn log houses. But in 1751 they and a few neighbors built their own modest stone structures. In 1753 John Hite, a few miles east of his father's house, built one of his own, "considered by far the finest ... west of the Blue Ridge." Average settlers may have scoffed at these people who made out they were "great folk" in their fancy houses. However, Bowman's, Chrisman's, and Frohman's stone fortresses—stockaded with split timbers—were often the difference between life and death to their cabin-dwelling neighbors.
"Mrs. Rebecca Brinker, the daughter of George Bowman," told Samuel Kercheval "she recollected when sixteen families took shelter in her father's house." She also remembered a time in 1764 when George Miller's daughter came to Bowman's with news that eight Indians had murdered the rest of her family while they spread flax to dry in the sun at their home two miles north of Funk's mill (Strasburg). Rebecca's younger brother Abraham took down his rifle and rode over to Miller's where he found Thomas Newell examining the bloody corpses of Mr. and Mrs. Miller and their two children. When enough men had gathered they trailed the Indians to South Branch Mountain. They killed one in camp. The others escaped. But they liberated Rachel Dellinger whose husband was dead, and whose baby's brains were stuck to a tree on Sandy Ridge west of Capon River. Mrs. Dellinger informed her rescuers the Indians were led by a white man, Abraham Mitchell, a notorious outlaw. A year earlier George Miller and John Dellinger tied Mitchell to a tree and laced his jacket good for robbing houses while the people forted at Bowman's. The raid was Mitchell's pay-back.
In later years these Germans were pulled along by currents they had set in motion. They were the first generation who—with anglicized Finns and Swedes, English and Welsh Quakers, Irish and Scots Presbyterians—carried frontier culture from its birthplace on the Delaware, through the Great Valley, and into the Mississippi River basin. In 1778 when Captain Joseph Bowman recruited men in Frederick and Shenandoah Counties to go to Kentucky with George Rogers Clark he "secured only such men as had friends in Kentucky or were induced by a desire to see the country." A roster of these pioneers shows Millers, Kogers, Longs, Funks, and Kellers—names common in the earliest days of the Valley's settlement.
In the 1770s Paul Frohman followed Braddock's Road to southwestern Pennsylvania, kept westering, and died in 1784 in Lincoln County, Ky. In 1774 Isaac Chrisman, son of Jacob Chrisman and Magdalene Hite, served in the militia on Clinch River in present Russell County. At Glade Hollow Fort he sold a deerskin apiece on credit to his commander Daniel Smith and his fellow soldiers William Crabtree and David Priest. He settled in Powell Valley until the Cherokee drove him to Rye Cove where in 1776 he built a fort, but the Cherokee killed him anyway.
In October of 1774 old Hite's son Jacob lived near present Leetown W.Va., probably in a newer house than his old "Dovetail Log house" that stood on land he advertised for sale on September 20, 1764. In 1775 he moved to South Carolina, "to the neighbourhood of the Cherokee country with his family, and a large parcel of negroes." His nephew Jacob Bowman had settled in 1768 at nearby Tumbling Shoals. When war broke out Hite favored independence from Britain; Bowman sided with the Loyalists. As a consequence of his polics, Cherokees killed Jacob Hite in 1776 at his home on Gilder Creek "with most of his slaves ..." His "wife and children [were] carried off prisoners; his son, who was in the Cherokee country, was likewise murdered."
In 1767 John Bowman and Peter Deyerle (once a bond slave to George Bowman, but now his son-in-law) settled higher up the Virginia Valley, Bowman near the big lick on Glade Creek and Deyerle at the forks of Roanoke. The area wasn't an outside settlement anymore, but was not immune from Indian attack. In 1778 Indians struck deep in the settlements, wounding a black man in the thigh at such close range the powder burned him. On the north fork of Roanoke "three Indians stole upon [some boys playing in the river], killed and scalped Richard Nicholson, about 10 years of age, James Bryan, somewhat younger, and tomahawked and scalped John Nicholson, but he recoverd." The government stationed militia at Deyerle's.
But John Bowman missed these events. The governor had ordered him to Kentucky with two companies of backwoods militia to turn back the Shawnee who were beginning to show respect for his "close shooters." He had been in Kentucky almost constantly since the spring of 1775 when—with eight men from his old home in Dunmore (Shenandoah) County—he and his brother Joseph dropped in to visit Boonesborough. Next season Joseph Bowman raised a cabin and made corn north of Harrod's Run (Mock's Branch).
In September 1777 Indians attacked the party John Bowman led from Harrodsburg to shell the year-old corn still cribbed on Joseph's place. The Indians killed two and wounded six. But the Harrodsburg men held them off when the colonel roared "Stand your ground!—we are able to beat them, by the Lord!" in his "great voice" that people said "could be heard a mile." Squire Boone (Daniel's brother) fetched one Indian through the bowels with his short, triple-edged sword, and Colonel John killed another, scalped him, and took the trophy to Virginia when he went to lobby the General Assembly to have kettles forged at Zane's iron works on Cedar Creek for a public salt works in Kentucky.
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| George Bowman's fort-house that succeded the pioneer log structures. During the French War Bowman's fort was a rallying point for the neighborhood of Strasburg, known then as Funk's Mill. |
In October Joseph Bowman boated the salt kettles down the Ohio and returned to Cedar Creek in time to welcome Colonel George Rogers Clark traveling west with secret instructions from Governor Henry. On January 23 Clark made Joseph captain and Isaac lieutenant of a company they were to raise "for my Ridgement" and went ahead to recruit more men on the Monongahela. At the end of March the Bowmans marched their men to Redstone Creek (Brownsville, Pa.), and in May embarked down the Ohio with Clark's small army, still in the dark as to their true purpose. In June, at their post on Corn Island above the falls, Clark disclosed that they'd been recruited to carry the war into the enemy's country. The French in the Illinois found out only slightly later, on the night of July 4 when residents of Kaskaskia awoke to shouts in the streets that Americans had seized the British fort with ne'er a shot fired.
Joseph Bowman rounded up the village horses and a few French allies for a gallop to the Mississippi. His Shenandoah riflemen, "Big Knife" warriors equiped "after the Indian fashion," met no resistance at Prairie du Rocher, St. Philipe, or Cahokia where their reputation as white savages preceded them. At Cahokia Bowman demanded and accepted the British commander's surrender. "I then took possession of a strong stone house, well fortified for war, and soon got word that there was a man who would immediately raise 150 Indians [to] cut me off [but] I confined him under guard."
In February of 1779 Joseph was one of Clark's starving and half-naked troops who watched stupefied as their commander mixed gunpowder and water, blacked his face, and "raised the war whoop," ordering them "to strike up one of their favorite songs" as he led them "one by one" through a prairie flood to the British post at Vincennes. With dry powder supplied by French settlers, and under cover of the buildings in town, they focused a deadly rifle fire on gun ports in the blockhouses of Fort Sackville, and sharpened their aim at night by firing at soldiers silhouetted against candle light pouring through cracks in the fort walls. After each shot they changed their own position to prevent British gunmen from targeting their muzzle flashes.
British Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton—"the hair-buyer general"—surrendered, and he and his officers were ordered into moccasins for what promised to be "a troublesome march through the woods and over mountains." Clark had the "partisans" who actually led Indian raids confined in irons, and sent them with Hamilton by boat down the Wabash and up the Ohio to the falls where Hamilton swapped a quilt for some bread before he and the other prisoners started for Williamsburg with two horses and bed rolls of blankets and bearskins, dependent solely upon their guards' rifles for bear and buffalo meat, and for protection against the frontier people who Hamilton said "looked upon [them] as little better than savages."
Hamilton's Indian raiders made it impossible for the Harrodsburg settlers to grind their grain on Salt River, or "to go for firewood or to plow without their arms." Nevertheless, settlers inside the stockade handmilled corn to feed the prisoners on milk and mush "for breakfast & supper, [and] Indian bread and Bears flesh for dinner." And Hamilton had opportunity to repay the civility Joseph Bowman showed him during negotiations with Clark for the surrender of Fort Sackville. He broke the news to John Bowman that his brother was badly burned in an explosion of "cannon cartridges" during a thirteen gun salute at Vincennes. Colonel John generously offered the Hair-buyer his own mount and sent to Logan's Station for more horses to help the prisoners through the canebrakes and over the mountains.
In May Colonel John stumbled in an offensive against the Shawnee town of Chillicothe on the Little Miami River. He destroyed corn, stole horses, fought an indecisive battle with Indians barricaded in their cabins, and retreated to Kentucky rather than face a reinforcement of Mingoes rumored to be on the way under Simon Girty. His actions angered Colonel George Rogers Clark who needed men to launch an attack against Detroit from Vincennes.
Smarting from Clark's criticsim, Colonel John "left a Negro man to tend" his corn at Harrodsburg and "went to Williamsburgh." Henry Hamilton said he went "to represent to the Govr. and Council, the injustice and severity of [Clark's] proceedings" against prisoners. In the fall he was back in Kentucky from Roanoke with his wife Elizabeth, their child John, and his grown stepsons William and David Bryant. His brother Colonel Abraham Bowman of the 8th Virginia Regiment arrived about the same time and moved into the fort at Harrodsburg. John took Elizabeth and the boy to Joseph's vacant cabin. Joseph had been dead since August, most likely of complications from his injuries. By law Joseph's fourteen hundred acres should have gone to the eldest brother. But Jacob Bowman was a Carolina Tory whose death in 1784 prompted his brother Abraham to remark "It was no matter at all; no matter."
During the hard winter of 1779 the colonels thought they lost Isaac. In November he commanded one of a pair of bateaux from Kaskaskia bound for the falls of the Ohio. The boats disappeared into the wilderness, ice-bound by the bitter cold. In spring one of the craft reappeared at French Lick on the Cumberland River where John Buchanan from the South Carolina backcountry was building a fort. Isaac was not on board. Chickasaw warriors had fired on Isaac's boat, broke his right arm with a fusee ball, and wounded an old man and woman traveling with him. Isaac got them into a canebrake, killed a bear, and "carved it with his lame hand" before the Indians took them. The Chickasaw treated them kindly and healed Isaac's arm, but for three years his brothers had no word. Not until the Chickasaw made peace in 1783 did they send Isaac home. He moved back to the family's Cedar Creek estate in Virginia where he built a brick house and died in 1836.
The hard winter wasn't over when the Colonels moved to John Bowman's land on Cane Run of Dick's River. Twenty families camped in the snow while turkeys tumbled off roosts, and buffalo and cattle died around them. In open-faced hunter's shanties they slept on buffalo hide pallets cushioned by heaped up leaves, and covered themselves with buffalo rugs with the wool side down, their feet toward roaring fires in front. They warmed themselves during the day by chopping wood and pounding meal in hollow stumps with pestles attached to spring poles. Richard Foley's family survived on six bushels of corn—a bushel apiece they brought from Virginia in the fall. Colonel Abraham brought more from Harrodsburg when he moved into camp. He may also have met his future bride, Sarah Bryant, the wife of Colonel John's stepson, William Bryant, who in a few months would be one of the dead left behind after Clark's Pickaway campaign, buried under the floor of an Indian cabin on the Big Miami, and the cabin burned over his grave so Indians couldn't find it and get his scalp. The Colonel's other stepson David Bryant stayed in the wilderness to tend stock with hired man Jacob Myers and a black slave. Bryant took sick and died, but his companions survived.
In March the campers emerged like bears from their dens. Colonel John was indeed a great bear of a man, two hundred sixty pounds, "the swiftest man of his size [young Elijah Foley] ever saw ... a jolly man; [a] mighty funny man." By planting time they were some thirty families strong, and went to work building Bowman's Station, two rows of cabins 150 feet apart crossed by another row in the form of an H, each half on the opposite side of a hollow through which the Spring Branch flowed into Cane Run.
In 1783 the Bowman's Station "families began to scatter: some to Tennessee, and some to their farms in other places ..." Elijah Foley remembered Colonel John building a mill on Cane Run and another on Dick's River, although he "was sick when he built this last (Would drink a gallon of water of a night)." He died in May of 1784, about the same time as Tory Jacob in South Carolina. Jacob's son came to Kentucky and claimed Joseph's land as his inheritance, but later sold it all to his uncle Abraham.
Earlier in Kentucky than the Bowmans were Abraham and Isaac Hite, grandsons of old Hite, and the sons of Abraham Hite and Rebecca Van Meter, who settled on the South Branch of the Potomac. The Hite brothers were piloted to Big Barren River in June 1775 by veteran longhunters Joseph Drake, Henry Skaggs, and Valentine Hermann. While prospecting for land near present Bowling Green they and their companions carved their names on beeches.
In April of 1777 Isaac Hite was at Boonesborough when Indians killed and scalped a man outside the fort. He went with the men who followed Boone more that a hundred yards down the lane. His heart must have jumped when he heard Indians leaping over fence rails behind them. He turned with the rest, and with the rest fired and "made straight at them," reloading fast, dumping charge and ball down his rifle muzzle and thumping the butt on the ground. He was one of four wounded, including Boone whose ankle was so bad Simon Kenton carried him most of the way.
A ball smashed Michael Stoner's hand and knocked his rifle to the ground. He bent over to pick it up and another tore into his hip. He couldn't pull a trigger but he begged anyone to take his gun and use it. Billy Bush fired twice and charged his gun for a third shot. He ran to where Stoner was hobbling along and grabbed the chunky German around the waist, pulling him in the direction of the fort, but Stoner warned him off, "We are to pig a mark Pilly Push." Bush followed at a distance, pointing his weapon, bluffing Indians into dodging imaginary rifle balls as Stoner made his way up the lane. When Stoner finally limped into the fort Bush saw the Indians reloading. He remembered he had only powder-charged his gun; the ball was still in his mouth. He dived into the fort just ahead of a shower of lead that kicked up gravel, cutting his legs that were bare to the knee because he hadn't put on leggings.
Isaac brother, Abraham, Jr., was with James Harrod in 1774 when he founded Harrodsburgh. He just missed Isaac, who—with surveyor John Floyd—was on his way to Kentucky via New River, the Kanawha, and the Ohio. Near the head of Salt River Isaac and James Douglas found dead men at a cabin and left a warning on a tree for Floyd before taking their pirogue to New Orleans to avoid ambush by Indians who even before the murder of the Mingo chief Logan were nervous about surveyors on their hunting grounds.
The route Isaac Hite followed with Floyd's party in 1774 had been pioneered by another German, John Peter Salling, who in 1740—seven years after docking at Philadelphia aboard the Pennsylvania Merchant—took his wife Anna Maria, his daughters Catherine and Mary Elizabeth, and his son George Adam from Conestoga Creek to live in the wilderness of the upper James "close under the Blue Ridge" (Glasgow, Va.). In March of 1742 John Howard, an Irishman from the lower valley, approached Salling and his neighbors Charles Sinclair and John Poteet with an offer of ten thousand acres apiece—the same amount the government offered him—if they would go on an expedition "as far as the River Mississippi." Without hesitation all three men left families to join Howard and his son as they set out over Natural Bridge on a journey so incredible it would have to be dismissed as fiction if not documented by independent sources.
They followed the Pennsylvania Road, fording James River at the mouth Looney's Creek, and probably paused to hunt at the Great Lick on Tinker Creek—then called Buffalo Creek—only a few of the hunters Thomas Walker blamed for wasting game—killing "Buffaloes for diversion, and the Elks and Deer for their skins." When they reached New River near Radford they killed five buffalo, stretched the hides over a wooden frame for a boat, and descended the river until rapids bucked them off. They crossed to an eastern fork of the gentler Coal River, made another boat at the forks, and descended the Kanawha and Ohio, gliding past fifteen-foot-thick sycamores, wading through knee-deep clover, and perhaps marveling at the ribs, vertabrae, and tusks of mastadons at Big Bone Lick. As they approached New Orleans "a Company of ... French men Negroes, & Indians" captured them as spies.
After two years in a New Orleans dungeon, Salling, Sinclair, and Poteet escaped with the aid of a fellow prisoner, a Frenchman, and sought refuge among the Choctaw people who shielded them for two months. Joined by another Frenchman and "a Negro boy," they skirted the Gulf in a pirogue and struck north from the Florida panhandle through the Creek Nation. The Frenchmen decided to remain with the Creeks; but the Americans continued to Fort Augusta on the Savannah River, and to Charleston where they boarded a vessel for Virginia. A French privateer captured the ship and set the hunters and crew adrift in a small boat in which they returned to Charleston. Now "destitute," save for "a Gun and Sword" apiece—gifts from an English privateer—Salling and his companions traveled by land to the cabin at the foot of the Blue Ridge where they had begun their journey three years earlier.
It wasn't long after Salling's epic journey before Germans settled beside streams flowing west. In the Fall of 1745 brothers Israel and Samuel Eckerling, and Alexander Mack, Jr. led a dissident band of Dunkards from Ephrata, Pa. to the cabin of Wilhelm Mack (Alexander's kinsman) west of New River. The Ephrata Register noted the departure of the Eckerlings, and expressed grave concern for their spiritual health, especially among their new neighbors: "raggamuffins, the dregs of human society, who spend their time in murdering wild beasts." Indeed, the animistic Dunkards of Ephrata must have shuddered when Gabriel Eckerling—who joined his brothers during the winter—showed up in Lancaster County with bales of deerskin slung from the saddles of pack horses, thereby compounding the sin of animal murder with the sin of animal slavery. In 1749 Dr. Thomas Walker found these Dunkards living west of New River in their settlement Mahanaim, feasting—contrary to their vegetarian habits—on venison and turkey.
One of the Eckerlings' German neighbors, Jacob Castle, had four hundred acres surveyed in 1739 west of Massanutten Mountain on the head of Cub Run Branch of Shenandoah. In 1740 he bought two hundred acres at the mouth of Hawksbill Creek from Jacob Stover, and sold seventy-five to Jacob Koger, one of Adam Mueller's in-laws. Sometime in the 1740s Castle moved to New River, and in February of 1749 he and two men named Philip Cable and John Lamme "announced that they were going to the French Dominions on Mississippi"—probably to hunt and explore like John Salling. Anxious authorities, however, attached the men's property to prevent their "desertion" and potential harm to England's imperial interests. Castle's preference for hunting with Indians must have put him on a short list of possible traitors.
The charge of treason against Castle may have originated with Heinrich Adam Hermann, the leader of six brothers from Pennsylvania by way of the Shenandoah. Hermann arrived on New River at about the same time as Castle, and built a cabin at the mouth of Tom's Creek, which on three consecutive days in April of 1749 Indians stripped of nine, fourteen, and seventy-three deer skins, besides eight worthless elk skins. For some reason Hermann believed Castle was involved, perhaps as pay-back for the treason charge. A few days later Adam Hermann and his brother Valentine raided Castle's hunting camp to take back the loot.
A grandson of John Buchanan told Charles Bickley that Adam Hermann gathered a posse and came to Castle's Woods on Clinch River with a warrant for Castle's arrest, but that Castle and "a party of friendly Indians" fought them off. Augusta County records show that on April 22 Castle had a warrant issued for the arrest of Adam and Valentine Hermann, who were hauled away to Augusta's square-log jailhouse for "Violent robbery." Adam Hermann persisted, however; and on May 17 he charged Castle yet again with "threatening to aid the French." Castle stood trial five days later and was acquitted.
The Hermanns took up large tracts of land east and west of the river, but lost much of it because they were too preoccupied with hunting to make improvements required to secure patents. In 1752 Valentine slashed rings through the bark of trees to mark a claim on Sinking Creek, and in 1754 contracted with George Hoopaugh, a Dunkard "who lived on Valentine's charity," to work the land as a tenant. But Indians spooked the longbeard, burning his corn, killing his best dog and "three Creatures" Jacob Hermann had pastured in his field. Hoopaugh bolted, leaving "his winter Crop in the Ground." And on May 7, 1754 sixty "Norward Indians" burned his stable, house, and fifteen bushels of wheat he had stored in the loft German-fashion.
In November of 1755 Adam Hermann and two of his sons went to hunt and gather corn at another "tomahawk improvement" when they stumbled across what seemed like a ghost but was in fact an escaped captive, Mary Ingles in the flesh, or what was left of it after she had tramped more than eight hundred miles from Big Bone Lick on the Ohio, living mostly on "black walnuts, grapes, pappaws [and] roots," traveling "thro' the frost, wading waters, climbing round cliffs and over ridges." Underbrush had torn off most of her clothes, and briars had lacerated her flesh. Hermann took her up river to his cabin. He fed her a few mouthfuls of bear meat and venison, and next day killed "a fine, little fat beef ... to make beef soup for her." He cleaned the cuts on her legs and bathed her frost bitten feet, and when she was strong enough brought her on horseback to a fort at Dunkard Bottom.
In March of 1756 Indians killed Valentine and Jacob Hermann, and captured Adam Hermann's son Daniel who later escaped. By 1757 the war had grown so hot that some of the Hermanns beat it to safety over the mountains. Adam's son, Henry, with his young family, showed up on the doorstep of the Moravians of Bethabara (Winston-Salem, N. C.) where they marketed their deer skins. The Hermanns had been on good terms with the Moravians since 1749 when Jacob Hermann told Bernhardt Schnell his grandfather "was by birth a Moravian, who had been driven from his country because of his religion."
In August of 1758 Adam and Daniel Hermann piloted a company of scouts from Mayo Fort in Henry County to New River where they happened on five allied Cherokee warriors leading stolen horses and carrying what were probably French scalps. Captain Wade detailed twelve executioners, including the Hermanns, to trail and kill the Indians. The other men would wait at "the Dunker fort."
The killers got their chance in a peach orchard where, according to John Echols, we "fired at [the Indians] & followed them up 'till we Kiled 4 of them, and wounded the other—We skelpt them that we Kiled." They followed the blood of the wounded man to the river and hunted for him on an island, "But we could not find where he went out." When the parties hooked up at the Dunkard Fort they swore never to tell that the Indians were Cherokees, and quickly packed their plunder for the return east, "for Signs of Indians was plenty & we had but little ammunition."
In 1763 a rumor that New River would be returned to the Cherokee sent Adam briefly to North Carolina. But he was back in Virginia on August 22, 1763 when "A man from New River" came to Bethabara with "a wound received from an Indian [and] a letter from ... the elder Herrman which said that since the last alarm they had seen no more of the Wild Men [and] had built a fort, where they and several other families were living together." In July 1763 Peter Herrman "reported [to the Moravians] that he had been in a fight with Indians at [Draper's] Meadow, and had shot one, whose tomahawk, etc. he had with him."
As soon as the war was over most of the Hermanns cleared out to hunt in "the Shawano country." In 1765 two of them brought "about 80 lbs. of deer-skins to [the store at Bethabara]" and reported seeing "nothing of the Indians." Next year Adam and his sons "were visited [in the wilderness] by Shawanoes, and also by a party of forty Mohawk warriors ... on their way to fight the Cherokees and Catawbas, [but] all were friendly to the Hermanns." This must have been Adam's last hunt, bacause a year later Mary Ingles' husband, William Ingles, on his way to Georgia to see Dunkard Valentine Zinn about purchasing his New River land, brought word to Bethabara that Adam Hermann had died.
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In 1764 the Moravians took in "the well known Stahlnecker," an Indian trader whom Dr. Thomas Walker wanted to pilot him to Kentucky in 1749. But Stalnaker had just moved from New River to the middle fork of Holston to be closer to his customers the Cherokee, and "his affairs would not permit him to go with me." Walker and his men helped Stalnaker raise the logs he had cut for his house before going on to win fame for themselves as the first English explorers of Kentucky, while Walker's more knowledgeable Dutch informant would suffer a tragic fate. A month before Braddock's defeat Indians murdered Stalnaker's wife and son and took him prisoner. He escaped "after having suffered much in their town" and served as a scout for Colonel Washington before fading into obsurity.
In 1770 another group of Virginians reached the Mississippi. Two of them—Kasper Mansker and Uriah Stone—both Germans—traveled as far as Spanish Natchez and back to Virginia through the wilderness, Mansker with a wedding dress for his "lady love" Elizabeth White who was older than he was. Her parents opposed her marriage to an ignorant hunter. But according to "a mulatto woman Jinney," who lived with Elizabeth White Mansker until she died at the age of one hundred, the couple ran away from present Berkley County, W.Va. "to the head of Holdson, where [Mansker] continued ... the many years of his long hunts." Now he was going back with money to make the union legal.
A year later Mansker returned to the wilderness with a party of forty hunters who for nine months fanned out through the canebrakes of central Kentucky and Tennessee. After Indians plundered their station camp they "lingered" their hunt eleven more months to recover the loss, sending pack trains to the settlements for iron, powder, and lead, earning the title "longhunters." Valentine Hermann—the sixth son of Adam Hermann—was one of only nine hunters who did not return to the settlements at any time in nearly two years.
Shortly before joining the longhunters in the spring of 1771 Valentine Hermann "took possession of a tract on Clinch River ... and raised a cabin on it." In the same year Henry, Matthias, Jacob, Daniel, and Peter Hermann followed their brother, settling near the heads of Clinch River and Bluestone Creek. In 1773 Valentine sold his land to Quaker William Wynne for "a mare, a horse and a wagon." Still restless, he settled in 1775 near Harrodsburg and, after the threat of Indian attack had passed, burrowed into the mountains of the Cumberland plateau to live a hunter's life until he died in 1815. His brothers remained in Virginia, killing game until there was little game left to kill, and fighting Indians until there were no more Indians who wanted to fight.
