Richard D. Blackmon - Dark and Bloody Ground: The American Revolution Along the Southern Frontier

In May 1769, a man who would become synonymous with the early American frontier first explored the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. On a ridge overlooking the country, Daniel Boone stood looking round with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below. Indeed, some years later Boone would write of the land that he esteemed a second paradise. But even at the very beginning, foreboding omens made their appearance. During that first trip west of the Appalachians, American Indians made Boone and his party captives. Though they escaped unharmed and returned to lead their families into the second paradise, the Indians presence should have been a warning. Instead of heeding the encounter, Boone determined to emigrate beyond the mountains and live there at the risk of my life and fortune.

That episode, in many respects, characterizes the years of the American Revolution along the southern frontier. In the 1760s, only a few long huntersmen who would go beyond settlements to hunt for a period of a year or morehad ventured across the mountains. By the early 1770s, a few had settled their families permanently in what would come to be known as the Overmountain region of what was then North Carolina and Virginia. After 1771, the Overmountain settlements experienced a flood of immigrants, due to the demise of the Regulator Movement in North Carolina and burgeoning population.

From 1765 to 1771, colonists in western North Carolina rose up against the corrupt colonial government in Halifax. These colonists, called regulators, primarily occupied themselves with disrupting courts for a lack of unbiased justice and driving off surveyors hired by government officials. In May 1771, however, over two thousand regulators met the governor and one thousand of his militiamen at Alamance, near present-day Burlington, North Carolina. The governor's troops defeated the regulators, hanging seven on the battlefield for treason. A vast majority fled the scene and subsequently escaped with their families to the Overmountain region, beyond the reach of the colonial governor and royal authority.

With the onset of the Revolution, Whig (Patriot) and Loyalist militias ravaged the southern states, forcing thousands of residents to seek refuge across the mountains. The southern Indian tribes directly affected by these American settlers initially included the Cherokees and Creeks, and soon the Shawnees north of the Ohio River. Then the Chickamaugas, an amalgamation of tribes throughout the south and north, established themselves and also became targets. The Shawnees and their various allies are included in this book only insofar as their operations against the Kentucky settlements are concerned. Likewise, the Chickasaws are only included regarding their operations against the Cumberland settlements.

On the eve of the American Revolution, the southern frontiers extended from present-day southwest Virginia and eastern Tennessee (the Overmountain settlements), to the area in western North Carolina east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, down into the northwest part of South Carolina, and into northern Georgia (the Ceded Lands). Expansion from these areas during the Revolution included the area known then, and now, as Kentucky, as well as the Cumberland settlements of present-day middle Tennessee. All of these areas experienced an influx of American settlers as well as almost continuous attacks by various militant factions of Indians. Though the areas except the Cumberland could claim a substantial settlement population before 1775, they experienced geometric population growth from immigration during the Revolution. Whether it was to escape the economic uncertainty of the east, the rigors of the conflict, or the depredations of troops and militias on both sides, settlers flooded west. Their migration put them on a collision course with some southern Indian tribes.

During the conflict, the southern tribes struggled to stem the tide of white settlers and maintain as much of their hunting ground as possible. Hunting had always been vital to sustaining Indian lifeways. Foremost, it provided the major source of sustenance for Indian diets. By the time of the American Revolution, it provided the currency of Indian economies: deerskins. Only by bartering deerskins could native peoples obtain the goods they had become dependent on in recent decades. Also, it provided the means to obtain firearms and ammunition to continue hunting and to defend themselves against enemies, whatever race they happened to be.