Chapter 1

Settlers on the Allegheny Plateau

THE WILDERNESS

In eighteenth-century Virginia, the Allegheny Mountains stood like a gigantic wall along the Virginia frontier, blocking all but the hardiest trappers and explorers from venturing west of the Shenandoah Valley. This range, which runs roughly from northeast to southwest, consists of a series of steep, parallel ridges and, were it not for a few natural passes, must have seemed almost impenetrable. Rising as high as three thousand feet in places, the Alleghenies acted as a natural sentinel that guarded entry to the Allegheny Plateau beyond.

The plateau itself stretched northwestward beyond the Ohio River in a broad expanse that paralleled the mountain wall on its eastern boundary. It was a lush region characterized by rolling hills that created numerous narrow valleys, punctuated by hundreds of creeks and rivers. Teeming with fish, these waterways, which all flowed to the Ohio beyond, were also home to numerous species of mammals whose pelts were highly valued in the markets of the eastern seaboard and Europe. Combined with a temperate climate that provided a typical growing season of 153 days and approximately forty-two to sixty-two inches of rainfall per year, the Allegheny Plateau looked like a potential paradise, beckoning European settlers to come and take it.⁶

However, one the most remarkable features of the Allegheny Plateau, and one that made a marked first impression on many Europeans, was the forest. The abundant rainfall, temperate climate and fertile soil contributed to the existence of dense, mostly deciduous woodlands in the lower elevations, with great belts of spruce and hemlock in the mountains. This was a primeval landscape unlike anything Europeans had ever seen. Conrad Weiser, a colonial Indian agent who was one of the early whites to arrive on the plateau, wrote, “The wood was so thick, that for a mile at a time we could not find a place of the size of a hand, where the sunshine could penetrate, even in the clearest day.”⁷ Henry Bouquet, a Swiss-born British officer serving on the frontier, commented that a European “must have lived some time in the vast forest of America; otherwise he will hardly be able to conceive a continuity of woods without end.”⁸

The New River cuts through the rugged Allegheny Mountains, which once posed a daunting natural barrier between Virginia and the western frontier on the Allegheny Plateau. Photo by the author.

Nevertheless, although the prospect of a forest without end might have appeared daunting, the land of the Allegheny Plateau was also capable of providing everything a settler might need in terms of the essentials of life. The forests of the plateau were filled with a wide variety of animal life, including white-tailed deer, elk, black bears, turkeys, mountain lions, beavers, gray wolves and small herds of buffalo. In addition, even without planting a single domestic crop, one could find a veritable bounty of native edible plants, with wild strawberries, chestnuts, walnuts, blackberries, hickory nuts, papaws, plums, grapes and cherries dotting the landscape, as well as a great supply of syrup-producing sugar maples.⁹

As a result, the first Europeans to arrive on the plateau could not help but see great potential in the land. One of those early arrivals, Joseph Doddridge, took note of the “fruitful soil”¹⁰ while others saw a great timberland begging for the axe and saw. Surveyor Thomas Lewis described the spruce, cherry, beech and maple trees as “the most and finest” he had ever seen.¹¹ Given these many attributes, it was not long before settlers, explorers and, sadly, greedy, ambitious land speculators began to venture beyond the Alleghenies in search of their future in a new “promised land.”

As these disparate groups endeavored to cross the mountains and then navigate the valleys and forests of the plateau, their greatest challenge was the absence of any roads, which would not arrive in this part of the world for decades. However, they quickly discovered the next best thing in a network of trails that crisscrossed the entire region. These trails, created over the centuries by migrating herds of buffalo and the foot traffic generated by local Indian tribes, were quickly adopted as natural roadways. By the time the first Europeans arrived on the scene, these buffalo paths took the form of deep gullies that followed the paths of the region’s major creeks and rivers. They generally passed east and west: “from rivers to and across mountains, they crossed, re-crossed, and were coterminous with one another.”¹² The result was a vast, almost web-like network that, for many years, would become the sole means of communication between new settlements and the more established regions on the east side of the Blue Ridge. Further, these trails eventually determined the entire pattern and distribution of settlement on the Allegheny Plateau.

This eighteenth-century French map shows the Allegheny Plateau region as “Indiana.” Library of Congress.

One of the most important trails, as well as the one that would influence settlement along the Monongahela River, was the Shawnee Trail. This pathway began on the South Branch Potomac River somewhere below what is now Moorefield, West Virginia and continued up that river to its confluence with the North Fork South Branch Potomac River. It then followed that fork and turned up Seneca Creek, passing Seneca Rocks, and finally crossed the crest of the Allegheny Mountains above the mouth of Horse Camp Creek. The trail then entered the Tygart River Valley near what is now Elkins and proceeded up the Tygart past present-day Beverly to Huttonsville.¹³

Once settlers used these trails to cross the mountains into the Allegheny Plateau, they encountered several major rivers, including the Monongahela, Cheat, West Fork, Tygart Valley, New and Greenbrier. Without the aid of maps and, since most of the trails followed the rivers, would-be settlers tended to follow these waterways, often meandering up a tributary. This practice, in turn, helped them find some of the most desirable farmland, which was located on these rivers’ broad, open flood plains.¹⁴

By this means, settlers were able to move westward from the Shenandoah and Greenbrier Valleys via the New River to the Kanawha and Ohio Valleys, establishing new settlements there by 1773. In addition, other settlers followed the Monongahela north to Fort Pitt, where they procured rafts to take them down the Ohio. This led to new homesteads from above today’s Wheeling, West Virginia, to the mouth of the Little Kanawha River.¹⁵

THE POLITICS OF EMPIRE

Politics greatly influenced the settlement of the Allegheny Plateau, including the region along the Monongahela around Prickett’s Fort, and had a significant effect on both the lives of settlers, like Phebe and Thomas Cunningham, and those Native Americans who lived on the plateau and in the Ohio Country to the west. Moreover, these politics were not merely those of colonial governors and their assemblies, as the relationships of nations and of kings often dictated life and death on the eighteenth-century Virginia frontier.

The Virginia frontier was just part of a battleground for empire, for political and economic domination among the powers of Europe. The battle for this empire began the day Columbus landed in 1492 to claim the New World for Spain’s king and continued for the greater part of the next three centuries. Eventually, the French, Dutch and British would essentially cede most of South America to Spain, but the eastern half of North America was quite another matter. France would claim ownership of North America with Giovanni da Verranzano’s exploration of the coast between Nova Scotia and the Carolinas in 1524, while Henry VIII sent John Rut to explore the east coast in 1527. Jacques Cartier added to the competition when he claimed the St. Lawrence watershed for France, and Britain countered with possession of Newfoundland by Humphrey Gilbert in 1583. In the meantime, Britain’s Sir Francis Drake successfully harassed Spanish forts and settlements on the Florida coast, and by 1604, the Spaniards were isolated to their Florida and Gulf Coast possessions.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the battle for the North American wilderness between the Atlantic Ocean, Mississippi River, Gulf of Mexico and Hudson’s Bay had been going on between France and Great Britain for more than 150 years. During this era, the fighting was almost incessant as the two countries fought five wars for the conquest of North America: Huguenot (1627–1629); League of Augsburg, or King William’s (1689–1697); Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne’s (1702–1713); Austrian Succession, or King George’s (1745–1748); and Seven Years’, or French and Indian (1754–1763).¹⁶ Each of these wars would end via treaty, and each of those treaties would sow the seeds for future conflict.

Another reason that French and British conflict lasted so long and was so bitterly contested is that the pattern of colonization and the very character of the respective French and British empires in North America were quite different. Although both nations’ interests were mercantile in nature, the French approach to the Native American occupants of the continent was more subtle and included a heavier dose of religion, provided initially by Recollet priests and then followed with greater success by the Jesuits. While the French did occasionally engage in battle with nations such as the Iroquois, Natchez and Fox, they never sought to “conquer” them or the land they would anoint as New France.

Instead, the French elected simply to pay the Indians very high duties for exploiting the wilderness and allow the Jesuits to see to the less worldly task of saving souls and pacifying pagan “savages.” As a result, New France consisted primarily of isolated, primitive trading posts scattered across a broad wilderness, with only a narrow band of settlements between Quebec and Montreal, and New Orleans and Mobile. For the most part, the Indians tolerated the French but still resented their intrusion, although usually not enough to war with them. Further, none of the tribes who lived in New France considered themselves French subjects and would have been incensed had it been suggested that they were. They also did not see the goods dispensed by the French traders as “gifts.” Rather, the items received from the French were exchanged either as “rent” or in direct payment for furs. As for the French themselves, it did not matter if they were Jesuit missionaries, trappers (what the French called “voyageurs”) or government colonial officials—they clearly understood that their very survival relied on not only maintaining good relations with the Indians but also nurturing the greed and ever-growing demand by the Indians for European goods.¹⁷

The French proved very adept at ingratiating themselves with the Indians at every opportunity and actually integrating themselves into tribal life. As a result, it was not uncommon for a Frenchman to speak one or more Indian languages and be thoroughly conversant in their customs. Further, marriage to an Indian was far more common and more readily accepted in New France’s colonial society than in the British colonies of North America. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, the French tended to be very knowledgeable regarding the various tribes’ ambitions and politics, allowing them to more easily negotiate with the Indians and maintain stable diplomatic and military relations. The British, however, were another matter entirely.

Significant British colonization began shortly after the 1604 Treaty of London between Great Britain and Spain. In that treaty, James I recognized and accepted existing Spanish properties in the Western Hemisphere but retained the right to take whatever remained “unoccupied,” despite the fact that thousands of Native Americans already occupied much of North America. Therefore, the British model for empire on the continent would be one of physical occupation and legal ownership based on European culture and custom. The very fact that the initial actions of James I in securing his new colonies was to charter two companies, the Virginia Company and Plymouth Company, is evidence of the British approach. The eastern portion of North America was thus divided between the two firms, with the Plymouth Company receiving charter to all the lands between the thirty-eighth and forty-fifth parallels of latitude and the Virginia Company holding rights to the region extending from the thirty-fourth to forty-first parallel.

From the moment the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery arrived on what the British would name the James River, the British approach was one of conquest and, more often than not, of conquest in the most brutal and violent terms. Their methodology was to unleash a seemingly endless flood of settlers upon the lands between the Atlantic and the Appalachian Mountains. While small numbers of explorers, hunters, trappers and traders, who usually interacted with the Indians in the same manner as their French counterparts, often arrived first, unlike the French, these men were quickly followed by settlers armed with “muskets, diseases, and ploughs.”¹⁸ The British made little, if any, attempt to accommodate the various Indian nations, and as a result, they quickly earned the Indians’ utter hatred.

However, as this process continued and the British moved farther west, their colonial governments soon learned that the “flood of settlers” would not be a naturally occurring event. Rather, potential settlers required encouragement from the government. After all, few were willing to take their families across the mountains to such a distant, remote and hostile place as the Allegheny Plateau without some inducement to do so. Therefore, between 1630 and 1750, as the French and British battled for greater control of the wilderness, colonial Virginia’s government created a series of policies that greatly influenced settlement beyond the Alleghenies, all of which were based on securing the colony’s frontier through encouragement of large-scale land speculation and the use of settlers as “human shields.”¹⁹ The first of these, the land law of 1630, was one of the most important pieces of legislation produced by the colonial Virginia General Assembly. Under this law, the colonial government made land grants available to groups of settlers willing to take possession of lands located at exposed strategic locations on the frontier. Importantly, possession was based on the English concept wherein “improvement” resulted in ownership. This idea was best expressed in 1750 by Henry Burwell, a member of the Virginia General Assembly, who stated, “That, notwithstanding the Grants of the Kings of England, France, or Spain, the Property of these uninhabited Parts of the World must be founded upon prior Occupancy according to the Law of Nature; and it is the Seating and Cultivating of the soil & not the bare travelling through a Territory that constitutes Right.”²⁰

This concept of ownership served two purposes. First, by being physically present, the settlers helped assert British dominion of the frontier, and second, they acted as a first line of defense against Indian uprisings, a “buffer zone” or human shield. At the time, few settlers chose to take advantage of these grants. Still, the law would become the foundation for Virginia’s land, settlement and frontier defense policies for the next 130 years.²¹

The General Assembly decided to revise the original land law in 1701, and in this version, it added emphasis on the military aspects of settlement. Under the 1701 law, the colony invited groups of settlers to petition for grants of between ten thousand and thirty thousand acres of wilderness land at no cost. However, the key provision was the requirement that these groups of settlers include at least twenty “warlike Christian men.” From that wording, the military implications of the revision could not be clearer. In return, the new owners of these parcels of land would receive a twenty-year tax exemption, with each man awarded his own grant of two hundred acres of farmland and a smaller town lot within the overall tract of land. In return, the settlers were required to build a half-acre fort, organize themselves as a militia serving under a commander selected by the governor and equip themselves with a supply of basic military hardware, including a musket, pistol, sword, tomahawk, five pounds of powder and twenty pounds of lead.²²

When the 1701 land law proved to be almost as unpopular as its predecessor, the assembly decided to try revising the statute one more time. In 1730, it cleverly eliminated any direct military references or requirements in favor of a highly commercialized approach to settlement. Frontier defense and military service were deleted from the law, and land speculators were inserted between would-be settlers and the colonial government. As a result, in the absence of requirements for being “warlike,” building forts and creating militias, the General Assembly stipulated that one family had to be settled within their grant for every thousand acres received, speculators had a two-year time limit in which to settle the families and families had to come from somewhere outside of Virginia. The latter was inserted apparently out of a fear that the law would be so popular it might lead to the depopulation of the eastern part of the colony.²³

The 1730 law led to an explosive growth in settlement and speculation, as millions of acres of frontier land were gobbled up by land speculators during the twenty years that followed the code’s enactment. Some of these speculators were individuals, while others were incorporated companies, such as the Greenbrier Company, Ohio Company and Loyal Land Company. The ownership of these firms included many of the most influential and powerful men in the colony, men such as Thomas Lee, George Fairfax, George Mason, Thomas Cresap, Augustine Washington, Lawrence Washington, William Beverly and Charles Lewis, all from the “first families” of Virginia.²⁴

The influence these speculators had in creating a virtual wave of settlement should not be understated. In order to meet the law’s requirements and gain ownership, they actively promoted the benefits of settlement west of the Alleghenies and recruited potential settlers from outside Virginia’s borders by offering additional inducements to settle on the frontier. The heaviest recruiting targeted not only German, Swiss, Welsh, Scots-Irish and English families living in the Middle Atlantic colonies but also Scots-Irish in Ireland and Rhineland Germans. Incentives included legal services involving deeds and land surveys and even financial aid, such as offering generous lines of credit.²⁵

Virginia’s government further aided the settlement of the frontier by encouraging religious tolerance and recruiting non-Anglicans into the fold. In 1738, Virginia governor William Gooch sought out Presbyterians by approaching the Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia and telling their ministers that, should they choose to serve on the frontier, they “may be assured that no interruption shall be given…so as they conform themselves to the rules prescribed by the Act of Toleration in England, by taking the oaths enjoined thereby, and registering the place of their meeting.”²⁶ This promise was given despite the misgivings of many in the colony’s Anglican hierarchy. However, as one historian noted, “So long as they were largely confined to the back country and the Great Valley, the Church of England planters and their clergy were not seriously disturbed.”²⁷ The General Assembly added to Gooch’s pronouncement in 1752 by enacting legislation that specifically exempted Protestant dissenters “from the payment of all public, county, and parish levies, for the term of ten years.” Then, in 1753, it further extended the tax exemption for all Protestants living west of the mountains to fifteen years. However, all these efforts by the General Assembly would presently be overcome by the final, decisive war for dominion over the North American wilderness.

The French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War, would be the most important of all the Anglo-French conflicts and was a historical watershed event in that it forever shifted the balance of power in North America and, with it, the course of American history. While the focus of the conflict would be in North America, the war was a global one, with fighting in Europe, the Caribbean, West Africa, India, the East Indies, Argentina, the Philippines and all the seas in between. In the end, it would:

determine for centuries to come, if not for all time, what civilization—what governmental institutions, what social and economic patterns—would be paramount in North America. It was to determine likewise whether Americans were to be securely confined…to a long but narrow ribbon of territory lying between the coastline and a not too distant mountain chain and whether their rivals, the French…were to remain a permanent and effective barrier to any enjoyment of the vast western interior of the continent.²⁸

In 1753 and 1754, both sides made preparatory moves for war, with the French importing regular army troops from France and pushing those forces deep into the Ohio Valley, establishing and garrisoning strong forts at Fort Presque Isle on the banks of Lake Erie, Fort Le Boeuf just to the south and Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. The latter was clearly the most direct affront to British and Virginian sovereignty, so Governor Dinwiddie dispatched a force of militia under twenty-four-year-old George Washington to expel the French from Duquesne. The expedition was driven back, and the bloodshed between the two sides escalated matters further.

Despite the fact that Great Britain and France were still officially at peace, the British dispatched an army under General Edward Braddock to America in 1755. Braddock’s instructions were to add colonial militia to his strength, move to seize Fort Duquesne and then advance to capture Forts Le Boeuf and Presque Isle. Of course, Braddock’s army would meet with disaster along the trails to Fort Duquesne, and Braddock was killed in the fighting. Now, there would be no turning back, and war raged along the frontier for the next eight years.²⁹

French and Indian forces defeated General Braddock’s army near Fort Duquesne in 1755. Library of Congress.

Led by brilliant—if somewhat mercurial—Prime Minister William Pitt, the British employed the power of the Royal Navy to control the seas and distracted the French on the European continent as they “destroyed their empire and captured their trade.”³⁰ The 1763 Treaty of Paris stripped France of all Canadian possessions, forever ending its political and military influence in North America. However, the conduct of the war and the violence with France’s Indian allies along the frontier during its course led to critical changes in British colonial settlement policy, changes that resulted in turbulent relations with settlers and colonial governments alike.

Although His Majesty’s government may have been fighting for power and trade, most American colonists, especially Virginians, fought for entirely different reasons. Those already living on or near the frontier supported the British war effort for more immediate and pressing concerns, primarily the safety of their frontier settlements. However, at the same time, many also saw defining and expanding the colony’s boundaries while ensuring the right to continued speculation as causes worth supporting. Nevertheless, as the end of the war approached, the British government had entirely different concerns regarding their colonial frontier.

By 1762, Britain had accrued an overwhelming debt of £133.0 million with annual interest charges amounting to over £4.3 million.³¹ Therefore, the British desired to bring peace to the Ohio Valley and Allegheny Plateau by finding accommodation with the Indian nations of the region, almost all of whom had allied themselves with the French at some point during the war. Moreover, if this meant making concessions unpalatable to the American colonists, then so be it.

In 1758, after decades of a highly confrontational style of settlement in which settlers were placed like military units at strategic locations along the frontier, the British government suddenly began imposing policies clearly intended to appease the Indians by closing the frontier to future settlement. In October of that year, a meeting called the Council of Easton was held near Philadelphia. The attendees included over five hundred Indians from thirteen different nations, along with colonial officials from Pennsylvania and the British Indian superintendent Sir William Johnson. The agreement negotiated by the council saw the government of Pennsylvania “cheerfully” release the Iroquois from abiding by the terms of the Albany Treaty of 1755, which had transferred ownership of most of western Pennsylvania to the British. This meant that all lands west of the Alleghenies were returned to the Iroquois Confederation, white settlement was prohibited and the Shawnee, Delaware and Mingo (also known as the Ohio Iroquois) could return to their lands.³²

The effects of this new policy were immediate, and while it succeeding in temporarily placating the Iroquois, the British did not stop there. Over the course of the next five years, they expanded and fortified the policy. In 1761, Colonel Bouquet issued a proclamation from his headquarters at Fort Pitt reminding everyone of the ban on settlement and then expanded the boundaries of the prohibition to include all of western Maryland and Virginia. Further, he announced that anyone caught violating the ban would be arrested and brought to Fort Pitt for trial by court martial. However, despite Bouquet’s pronouncement, many frontier settlers simply ignored the ban and, frankly, the cost and trouble to effectively enforce the policy required far more resources than Bouquet had available.³³

Two years after Bouquet made his announcement, the British government decided to take sterner measures. On October 7, 1763, His Majesty’s government issued the Proclamation of 1763, which formalized the policy banning settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. Further, it ordered any British subject currently living there to leave the frontier and return east of the mountains and sought to regulate and restrict any contact between whites and Indians. Under its provisions, traders wanting to do business with the Indians were required to be licensed by the appropriate colonial governor and adhere to all trade regulations. Meanwhile, other colonists were prohibited from buying land directly from the Indians.

Colonel Henry Bouquet receives Indian captives at a camp on the Muskingum River in this eighteenth-century drawing. Library of Congress.

Almost immediately, speculators approached William Johnson and the other British Indian superintendent, John Stuart, clamoring loudly and insistently for relief from the proclamation’s provisions. In response, the British Secretary of State eventually gave both men permission to negotiate new agreements for a limited amount of land that would be given only as grants to war veterans. However, the speculators continued their assault and both Johnson and Stuart quickly succumbed to the incessant pressure. Within a few months, they had negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with the Iroquois and the Treaty of Hard Labor with the Cherokee, which moved the proclamation line westward from the Alleghenies to the Ohio River, reopening the Allegheny Plateau to speculation and settlement. By the following spring of 1769, settlers began surging over the mountains once more.

THE EARLY SETTLERS OF NORTHWEST VIRGINIA

The first recorded settlement on the Allegheny Plateau occurred in 1749, and while there may have been some unrecorded settlers who arrived earlier, this was the first wave in a coming deluge. However, this first settlement was also somewhat unique. Located near present-day Marlinton, which bears the name of one of the settlers, it consisted of a homestead shared by two friends, Jacob Marlin and Stephen Sewell. The two men built a cabin, but soon, their friendship soured. Although they were best friends and agreed on most matters, they found that they had profound disagreement when it came to matters of religion. Apparently, this conflict caused such intense bickering that Sewell moved out of the cabin and took up residence in a nearby hollow sycamore tree. When a surveyor named Andrew Lewis passed through the area conducting a survey for the Greenbrier Company in 1751, he found Sewell still living in the tree.³⁴ However, it is, hopefully, safe to say that most settlers were not quite so quirky.

It is difficult, at best, to accurately characterize the settlers who made the arduous journey over the Alleghenies to their new homes west of the mountains. When most of us imagine these settlers, we probably envision the classic stereotype: Scot-Irish from the Ulster Plantations; poor, uneducated, independent and self-sufficient; Sabbath-observing, God-fearing Christians who still enjoy the occasional pull from a jug of corn whiskey; and someone who sees the Indian as a creature to disdain, hate and fear. As with all stereotypes, this one likely contains elements of truth.

Unfortunately, there are no polls or surveys to provide us with a clear picture of the settlers of the plateau, and much of the historical evidence is anecdotal in nature. Still, the anecdotes do help provide important context, and what they show is a remarkably diverse population that reflected the nature and cultural flavor of America’s colonial immigrants. First, there were members of some dissenting Protestant religious groups, such as the Presbyterians, as well as others less welcome in the Anglican-dominated communities of the eastern seaboard, such as German Lutherans. However, these were more the exception than the rule. Instead, most settlers came to the frontier simply seeking farmland. Some would purchase their land from large speculators, such as the Greenbrier Company, but others would simply “squat” on the land, occupying it without a deed or title. Given that there were no land offices or often even a survey, a tomahawk in the settler’s hand was sufficient to claim the boundaries of his land. This approach became known by the term “tomahawk rights,” and it was not only respected by other settlers, but also formally recognized later in Virginia law.³⁵

However, historian John Boback provides what is perhaps the best and most concise description of the ethnic and social diversity of the Allegheny Plateau’s mid-eighteenth century settlers:

A traveler passing through the region in 1753 might have encountered…Englishmen who had embraced the religious views of a German Evangelical Lutheran, an Islamic scholar from North Africa, Scots-Irish Presbyterians from the plantations of Ulster, German Pietists with an inclination toward religious mysticism and monasticism, English squatters, and a diverse array of hunters, trappers, indentured servants, escaped slaves, and fugitives from justice.³⁶

While some of these settlers came from eastern Virginia, owing to the government’s efforts to attract settlers from outside Virginia, most came from Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey, with a few arriving from New England or directly from Europe. Many of the arrivals from other colonies had been born and raised in America and almost all of the settlers, no matter their point of origin, moved west as part of a larger, extended kinship group.³⁷ Therefore, most came as part of a family, and on many occasions, this would include members of multiple generations.

Exactly how many settlers arrived after 1769 is difficult to calculate accurately, as there were no tax or census records until the 1780s. Nevertheless, historians have employed other record sources, both official and unofficial, to estimate the population of northwestern Virginia in the 1770s. Again, historian John Boback offers some insight here. In analyzing the account books from George and Sampson Matthews’s trading post in the Greenbrier Valley for 1771 through 1774, he found 401 distinct names, which we can safely assume as having primarily been male heads of household. If you also assume that not every settler family in the valley had an account at that trading post and add in an average family size, it is very possible that as many as two thousand settlers lived in the Greenbrier Valley at that time. Unfortunately, there are no trading post account records for the upper Monongahela Valley near Prickett’s Fort. However, Boback did find a 1777 dispatch from Colonel Zackwell Morgan to General Edward Hand at Fort Pitt in which Morgan states he had assembled five hundred men to fight the Indians and suppress a Tory uprising. Given that the law required every able-bodied man between the ages of sixteen and fifty to serve in the militia, it again appears safe to assume that the settler population of the upper Monongahela at that time also exceeded two thousand residents.³⁸

Whatever their numbers, it also seems that their fellow American colonists from the east did not appreciate them, and many saw the Alleghenies as not only a significant physical boundary but a cultural one, as well. One contemporary observer considered them to be a distinctive breed, the “back settler.” The men were “ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable,” while their wives and children “live in sloth and inactivity; and having no proper pursuits.” The result, he said, was “a mongrel breed, half civilized, half savage.”³⁹Another source, a young Massachusetts lawyer, noted the settlers were “altogether different from what they call the lowlanders, i.e., the people of the east side.” Meanwhile, he did compliment them for being “more industrious” than their fellow Virginians, but he also found “all sorts of indolent ignorant people, who raise a little corn, but depend chiefly on hunting for their support.”⁴⁰ As unflattering as these observations might be, they contain kernels of truth simply because life on the Allegheny Plateau was very hard, even by the standards of the time, and those who lived there had to be tough and perhaps less refined if they were to survive.

A living historian is dressed and equipped as an eighteenth-century militiaman at the modern-day site of a re-created Prickett’s Fort. Photo by the author.

LIFE ON THE ALLEGHENY FRONTIER

As he approached the last years of his life, William Haymond Jr., the son of Colonel William Haymond, thought back on his childhood growing up on the frontier and wrote, “When I think of those times…it seems strange to me how the people survived many times with-out [sic] anything to eat and with but little to wear.”⁴¹ As those words indicate, life on the Allegheny Plateau frontier was often a simple struggle for survival. Although natural resources were plentiful, the land could be very unforgiving, and settlers had to conduct a constant battle to maintain even a subsistence-based existence.

There was no immediate source of supplies or European-manufactured tools and materials, and the terrain did not lend itself to traditional European farming methods. Not surprisingly, therefore, settlers soon began a process of cultural borrowing from the Indians. Indian clothing designs and the use of natural materials in them were quickly adopted, as was the use of canoes, herbal remedies, foods, farming techniques and even vocabulary. Employing natural materials also applied to settler’s homes, which were primarily constructed from logs, given the complete absence of any sawmills for more refined lumber. Swedes, Finns and Germans from Silesia, Bohemia and Moravia brought the practice and knowledge required for horizontal log homes from Europe to Delaware and eastern Pennsylvania, from where this custom spread to the Shenandoah Valley during the mid-eighteenth century. By the time settlers began crossing the Alleghenies in significant numbers, the basic skills needed to build log homes had proliferated to nearly every social and ethnic group.

Furthermore, log homes were an ideal solution not solely because raw timber was so plentiful on the plateau but also because building them did not require anything but the most rudimentary of tools. Essentially, if a settler possessed a good felling axe, broad axe, adz,⁴² froe,⁴³ crosscut saw, auger, hammer and perhaps a chisel or hand plane, he was in business. With these few tools and a forest filled with trees, a settler could build an entire log cabin in less than a week, assuming he had neighbors or extended family willing to lend a hand. In addition, the opportunity to have a communal cabin “raising” provided a welcome excuse for community socializing, combining much-needed merriment with the hard work of building the cabin.⁴⁴

While the typical cabin was relatively small, if the area was new to settlement and there was no one to share the workload, it could take substantial effort for a single family to complete just the preliminary steps required to build their home. First, you had to prepare the site, which often meant clearing trees and burning down the stumps. Then, using the felling axe, the settler cut down the trees required to provide the right amount of logs for the home. Next, the trees were cut to the proper length, their bark peeled and the resulting logs hewn flat on two opposite sides with a broad axe. Once the logs were prepared, the settlers used a horse to skid the logs through the forest to the construction site. If weather and time permitted, the logs were stacked and allowed to at least partially season, which helped prevent warping.⁴⁵

Photo of Daniel Boone’s Kentucky cabin, which was probably similar to many of those scattered across the Allegheny Plateau. New York Public Library.

Log homes on the Allegheny Plateau were not only small, but they also had few, if any, amenities. The Reverend Francis Asbury described his stay with a northwest Virginia family in their isolated cabin, saying, “We have, not unfrequently [sic], to lodge in the same room with the family, the houses having but the one room, so that necessity compels us to seek retirement in the woods.” On one occasion, however, the good reverend did stay inside, recording, “we had, literally, to lie as thick as three in a bed.”⁴⁶ Often, the floors were merely packed dirt, and many homes lacked even so much as one piece of iron hardware in their walls or roofs because, as settler Joseph Doddridge recalled, “Such things were not to be had.”⁴⁷

A few of the crudest cabins might not even have a fireplace, but, in most of them, the fireplace was the center of the home’s activity. The central fire would burn continuously throughout the year, providing a means of cooking and baking, as well as warming the house in the cold winter months. Usually, a greenwood lung pole bisected the chimney flue six to eight feet above the hearth, from which chains extended to suspend pots during cooking. When cooking more than one item, one would rake coals to the side of the hearth apron to create additional cooking stations. This also served to allow for a more controlled source of heat away from the open flame. Naturally, this required a great deal of fuel, and a typical cabin with a single fireplace burned between fifteen and twenty cords of wood each year.⁴⁸

While the traditional image of a colonial frontier fireplace includes a hearth filled with numerous pots, pans, griddles and skillets, the average frontier settler did not possess such a bounty of cooking equipment. Their “kitchens” were far more Spartan, as at least one early frontier probate inventory indicates, wherein the deceased left a wife, six children and an estate for which the household goods consisted of “some pewter, a pot, two bedstands [sic], bedding, one chest, and a box.”⁴⁹

The fireplace also served as an important source of light. Windows were usually small, and the light they provided was poor even on the brightest of days. However, lighting supplements were used, among them the pine knot, also referred to as “candlewood.” A Reverend Higginson, writing in 1633, described them, saying, “They are such candles as the Indians commonly use, having no other, and they are nothing else but the wood of the pine tree, cloven in two little slices, something thin, which are so full of the moysture [sic] of turpentine and pitch that they burne [sic] as cleere [sic] as a torch.” The candlewood was often held in an iron, pincer-like device, and it “droppeth [sic] a pitchy kind of substance where it stands.” For this reason and because they could fill the room with smoke, the candlewood was usually burned in a corner of the fireplace, on a flat stone.⁵⁰

Grease or fat lamps were also used. These were small, shallow containers, usually iron, containing tallow, grease or oil. A wick was held in a projecting spout, and these lamps often had a hook and chain link, allowing them be hung from a nail in the wall or from the back of a chair. When used on a table, they were placed on a thick wooden stand. The simplest form of candles were called “rushlights” because they were made by stripping away the outer layer of common rushes, leaving the pith. The pith was, in turn, soaked in tallow or grease and allowed to harden. When lit, rushlights were placed in holders similar to those that held the candlewood.⁵¹

Natural materials also found their way into the making of farm implements. Lucullus McWhorter, the stepson of Phebe Cunningham’s granddaughter, wrote that she told him how she and Thomas made horse collars from the soft fiber of the linden tree, saying, “When the sap was in full flow the bark was stripped from the trunk in long sheets and thrown into the water and left there until the sap-fiber became loosened; when it could be separated from the rough outer coating in thin ribbon-like layers. This was plaited into thick pads and used for horse collars. Grape vines or hickory bark twisted into ropes, answered for traces.”⁵²

Raw natural materials were also employed in clothing. Cotton and silk were very popular in colonial-era clothing, but they were seldom seen on the Virginia frontier because they had to be purchased at trading posts, which were few in number, and these fabrics tended to be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, the isolated, cash-strapped settlers of the plateau had to rely on what they could obtain from the forest and their fields, while applying some ingenuity. Wild game provided a source of leather, which settlers used for leggings, breeches and hunting shirts. However, leather provided little protection from the cold, so settlers relied heavily on cloth, primarily linen made from flax. As one settler recalled, “Everybody made their own clothes of flax beginning with the cultivation of the staple.”⁵³

Settlers planted flax in mid-spring by broadcasting seeds into a prepared field, which was referred to as a “flax patch.” The flax patch was decidedly low maintenance in that it only had to be weeded once prior to harvesting the crop in mid-July. Because the fiber needed for manufacturing linen was in the stalk, which stretches well downward into the root system, flax could not be harvested by merely cutting it down. Instead, the plants had to be carefully pulled from the ground, roots and all. Moreover, if the harvesting was labor-intensive, the process of turning the raw crop into fabric was even more so:

As a general thing the people raised a patch of flax. This was pulled and spread on the ground to dry and then staked. After this it was spread out on a clear grassy sod to “rot” as it was called. When sufficiently rotted from the stem to break easily, it was taken up and securely stacked for use as it might be wanted. The next operation was to brake it on a home made wooden brake. Then it was “swingled” [sic] or skutched [sic] over the end of a board some 8 or 10 inches wide the other end being driven into the ground, and standing some three or four feet high. The fiber as it came from the brake was held in the left hand and about one half of it thrown over the board & scutched [sic] with a long wooden blade till it was clean and soft. It was then hackled which separated the courser part from the finer part of the [illegible]…The flax was then spun on a wheel by the mother and her daughters. The thread thus produced constituted the [illegible] of the finer quality of linsey [sic] which constituted the principal part of the material worn by the men and boys of the country.⁵⁴

However, one of the biggest challenges facing the frontier settler was farming and the ability to not just grow and transport sufficient crops to market but, more so, to simply provide enough food to feed themselves. When the first settlers crossed the mountains, they naturally brought the farming methods and practices they had used in the eastern lowlands and Shenandoah Valley with them. These included the use of horse-drawn plows in large, open, sunlit fields with widely diversified crops such as wheat, oats and rye, as well as orchards of apple, peach and cherry trees. However, while most of these same crops could be grown on the Allegheny Plateau, the dense forest made it far more difficult to produce them in any meaningful quantity, and it often took years of hard labor to gain enough headway against the woodlands to allow for something as sophisticated as an orchard.

First, the dense forest made it almost impossible for the earliest of settlers to farm with a plow or any other horse-drawn implements. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the massive forest canopy placed most of the land in dark shade for a substantial portion of the growing season. As a result, the settlers again borrowed from the Indians and employed the “slash and burn” method used by generations of Native Americans. First, the settlers would clear the proposed field area of smaller trees using axes and then girdle the larger trees and strip off as many of their branches as possible. The branches were then dried until they could be burned, at which point they were stacked at the bases of the girdled trees and set afire. This killed the trees, and they were quickly cut down.⁵⁵ In the early 1780s, an American Loyalist named John Ferdinand Smyth toured the rural regions of America and, after moving to England following the Revolutionary War, wrote a book on his observations in which he included a description of the clearing process: “The general mode of clearing the land in this country, where timber is of no value, and labour [sic] is of great, is by cutting a circle round the tree, through the bark, quite to the wood, before the sap rises, which kills it; and they cultivate the ground below immediately, leaving the trees to rot landing, which happens within a very few years, and they never bear leaves more.”⁵⁶

Once this process was complete, settlers cleared the “deadenings” away and planted crops between the dead stumps, which often were simply left in place. Sometimes the settlers would plant their crops in rows, as was traditional in European farming, or, more often than not, they would once more borrow from the Indians and build small mounds on which to plant. Although they probably did not realize it, the Indians had long ago figured out that planting their crops on these little hills helped reduce the damage done by frosts by trapping the cold air near the ground in the small valleys created between the mounds of earth.⁵⁷

Now the settlers could plant, and the typical farm on the Allegheny Plateau might include corn, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, beans, turnips and other vegetables. Once settlers harvested a crop, it needed to be stockpiled, which they accomplished via a variety of means. If the family managed to build a root cellar, they could store vegetables such as beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, parsnips, potatoes, radishes, turnips and winter squash. Absent this method, they packed vegetables in barrels filled with straw, the latter serving to prevent spoilage from spreading throughout the barrel. Carrots were often buried in sawdust or sandboxes, and other vegetables such as corn, beans and peas were dried and used later for cooking. Green corn, meanwhile, could be preserved by turning back the husk to expose the last, thin layer and then hanging it in the sun or a very warm room to dry. Sweet corn, however, was typically either parboiled, removed from the cob, dried in the sun and then bagged in a cool, dry place or dried in the husk and buried in salt. String beans, squash, apples and pumpkins were strung on thread and hung to dry.⁵⁸

Pioneer farmer J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur remarked, “Besides apples we dry pumpkins which are excellent in winter. They are cut into thin slices, peeled, and threaded. Their skins serve also for beer, and admirable pumpkin-pies are made with them. When thus dried they will keep the whole year.”⁵⁹ He added:

We often make apple-butter, and this is in the winter a most excellent food particularly where there are many children. For that purpose the best, the richest of our apples are peeled and boiled; a considerable quantity of sweet cider is mixed with it; and the whole is greatly reduced by evaporation. A due proportion of quinces and orange peels is added. This is afterwards preserved in earthern [sic] jars, and in our long winters is a very great delicacy and highly esteemed by some people. It saves sugar, and answers in the hands of an economical wife more purposes than I can well describe. Thus our industry has taught us to convert what Nature has given us into such food as is fit for people in our station.⁶⁰

However, lest this sound like a veritable cornucopia of food was available, it must be remembered that it took years for a settler to successfully clear enough land to grow sufficient crops to feed just his immediate family, much less provide a surplus to be sold. This meant that most settlers had to survive and struggle through some very lean years. One early settler, John Scripps, remembered his first years on the Allegheny Plateau, saying, “Few settlers had land in cultivation more than sufficient to raise food for their own consumption, and generally by Spring there would be no bread in the country and people lived on [wild] greens…daily gathered by women and children.”⁶¹

Another settler recalled running out of grain and having no bread for his family for six weeks in 1773. As a result, they survived on venison, wild turkey and bear meat but not without difficulty: “…after living in this way for some time,” the family “became sickly” and were “tormented with a sense of hunger.”⁶² In fact, without wild game and naturally growing nuts and fruits, most initial settlers would probably have not survived their first years on the plateau.

Furthermore, while settlers might achieve a basic level of subsistence, they still required some materials that could only be bought in stores, such as tools, salt, black powder, lead for bullets and seeds for planting. This required both the existence of a store stocking these supplies and the cash to make these purchases, which, of course, meant that the settlers had to be able to sell commodities from their farms. Logically, it follows that, without a local store or trading post, there was nowhere nearby to sell those commodities, providing a classic Catch-22 scenario. In fact, it would be 1783 before the first trading post opened in the upper Monongahela Valley. Therefore, most early settlers on the plateau had to journey to the established commercial centers of the Shenandoah Valley, which was more easily said than done.

Remember that the same Allegheny range these settlers had labored to cross to arrive at their new settlements also stood between them and markets in places such as Staunton and Winchester. The rugged trails over the mountains would not be upgraded to primitive roads capable of supporting the use of wagons until sometime after the Revolutionary War. That meant that, in the intervening years, only packhorses could make the arduous journey, which was described in many letters and journals. One Methodist circuit rider, Reverend Richard Whatcoat, made the trip from the Greenbrier Valley to the upper Monongahela in the summer of 1790 and described it “As Ruf a Road” as he had ever traveled.⁶³ Others lamented the mountain’s steep grades, fallen trees, swift creeks and rivers, dangerously swollen fords, deep mud, badly marked trails, deep snows and even the low-hanging tree boughs that constantly threatened to knock a rider off his horse.

As a result, trips to the Shenandoah markets were often only an annual event. Settler David Crouch remembered that his father would travel over the South Branch of the Potomac once a year to “get two/three bushels (80 lb. to a bushel) of salt,” which would last the family a year.⁶⁴ Even George Washington commented on the traffic moving across the mountains during a September 1784 trip in which he encountered “numbers of Persons and Pack horses going” east to purchase “Salt and other articles at the Markets” on the far side of the mountains.⁶⁵

However, despite the travails of farming and supplying one’s family with enough food to eat, the greatest challenge to survival was the Indian raid. As indicated in the previous discussion of politics, wars and treaties, the presence of a Native American population that had lived in the Ohio Valley and on the Allegheny Plateau for decades led to a tragic and, perhaps, inevitable clash of cultures. Plus, the settlers were not merely living on the front lines: their very presence was often the cause of conflict. That conflict resulted in more than a century of continuous violence, bloodshed and death along the Allegheny frontier with great loss of life for Indians and settlers alike. And for the latter, the constant fear of Indian attack would impact almost every aspect of their daily lives.