History of Old
Sumner
Bledsoe’s Creek, Part Two
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Isaac moved quietly
along the creek until he found a place to ford. Fresh venison would
make a welcome change from the dry jerky he and Kasper Mansker had
gnawed as they bushwhacked down the creek from Kanta-kee. Glancing
at the lowering sun he reckoned he had two hours until dark, and
only a buffalo trace to guide him to his rendezvous with his fellow
hunter eight miles west.
Kasper had a fire
going when Isaac finally found him at dusk along the creek at the
foot of the large bluff under a hill where they had parted that
morning. Tomorrow they would build a lean-to and set up their base
camp; tonight they would feast on deer haunch, corn pone and their
discoveries. Their stories were similar: Kasper had found another
spring and salt lick eight miles west of here, along a large creek
under a bluff, with buffalo and deer - two less than when he found
it. Between the creeks were rolling meadows and forests of big
trees, oaks, chestnuts, maples, beech, hickory, and butternut,
indicating rich soil. Sycamores and canebrakes marked the creeks,
and Cedars the rocky glades. Their rendezvous was at the foot of a
knob later named Pilots, and the three creeks were from then known
as Manskers, Station Camp, and Bledsoes.
Beyond The Settlements - David Wright, Artist
The year was 1772, and
Isaac, at thirty-seven, was already experienced as a woodsman,
soldier, surveyor, and Indian fighter. While middle aged by frontier
standards, his most active years lay ahead of him. He and his
brother, Anthony, had already pioneered one frontier, in the Holston
River Valley, near Abingdon, Virginia. Now another one lay open
before them in the remote wilderness along the middle Cumberland
River country.
First he had
unfinished business back in Virginia. Later that year he was to
marry young Katherine Montgomery. A daring, plucky girl, she was
born in Northern Ireland, the sister of Colonel John Montgomery,
founder of Clarksville and of the county that bears his name, who
turned back the Indians in many engagements, and who served with
George Rogers Clark in securing the Illinois territory. It is said
by Katherine’s descendants that she was an excellent horsewoman who
carried messages through the woods to General Washington during the
Revolutionary War.
War was brewing in the
Valley of the Holston. The British Governor, Lord Dunmore, was
having a difficult time with his subjects in the Royal Commonwealth
of Virginia, and was so angered by their revolutionary sentiments he
dissolved the Virginia Assembly in 1772, 1773. and again in 1774. In
1775 he seized the colony’s store of powder, thereby bringing about
an armed uprising. Taking refuge aboard an English warship, he
declared martial law, proclaimed freedom to slaves who would join
the British, and proposed using the Indians against the rebels.
Defeated at Great Bridge near Norfolk on Jan. 1, 1776, he ordered
his ships to bombard the city, thereby setting it afire. (1) Royal
government in Virginia was ended, even before the Declaration of
Independence was signed later that year in Philadelphia.
Frontier Rifleman - David Wright, Artist
North Carolina was
having its own Revolution. In May of 1775, one month after the
battles of Lexington and Concord, a committee of patriots met in
Mecklenburg County and passed a set of strongly worded resolutions
which stated that …’the political bands that connected us to the
Mother Country…” were dissolved. (2)
The Indians eagerly
adopted the British cause, and began massacring settlers – men,
women and children - across the Blue Ridge in Virginia and North
Carolina, along the Holston, Watauga, French Broad, Clinch,
Nolichucky and Powell River Valleys, as well as in Kentucky. The
British supplied them with guns, powder, knives and leadership, and
all of the tribes welcomed this support from the enemy of their
enemy. Britain was far over the ocean; the settlers were here,
clearing and plowing, killing their game, building cabins and
raising families. They deserved no mercy.
Americans who crossed
the great mountains to escape British occupation and Tory revenge
found themselves living in isolated valleys in lonely cabins or
crowded into small stockades, surrounded by merciless savages ten
times their numbers who spoke no English and gave no quarter. A man
who went forth to find his cattle might never know if he would
return, or, if he did, whether he might find his wife and children
weltering in their own blood, scalped, or kidnapped. Defense, beyond
his log walls, consisted of gathering a few neighbors and going in
pursuit, which often led to an ambush. To be strong everywhere was
to be strong nowhere.
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Photos taken at
Martins Station State Historic Park courtesy of David Wright,
Photographer |
The settlers went on
the offensive. In October of 1776 militiamen from the upper Holston
mustered near present-day Kingsport, where they were joined by 300
militia from North Carolina. Placing themselves under the command of
Virginia Governor Patrick Henry’s brother-in-law, Colonel William
Christian, they took up the march for the Cherokee towns. At the
head of a company he had raised was Captain Isaac Bledsoe.
The Cherokee, instead
of defending, retreated from their towns, and Colonel Christian
burned five of the most hostile, sparing their sacred capital of
Chota. Emissaries came down from the hills suing for peace, and it
was granted. With peace of a sort returning, Isaac was off on
another long hunt, this time for property.
Sycamore Shoals - Tennessee State Museum
Of the instruments of
the white man’s domination - the long rifle, the plow, the fence, or
the log cabin - the one most hated by the Indian was the surveyor’s
compass. To them the man peering into a mounted glass, surrounded by
others with poles or dragging measuring chains, meant one thing –
the loss of their land forever. Surveyors became the special target
of their wrath, and were sought out by war parties for their most
exquisite tortures. After John Peyton and four companions were
nearly annihilated by sixty Cherokee one night in February of 1786
on Defeated Creek he sent word to Hanging Maw, asking that he return
his property. The Cherokee Chief responded that the horses were now
his very own, and “As for his land stealer” the leader responded, “I
have take it and broken it against a tree.” (3)
To the landless Irish
tenant, to the farmer longing for virgin soil and a new start, to
the governments of North Carolina or Virginia short of cash to pay
their militia, to the patriot who had bled for freedom, to the
speculator eager to buy up and claim the soldiers’ warrants, to
Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress in Philadelphia
looking for westward expansion of a young country, to all of these,
land was the source of all wealth and an urgent necessity. But to
use it they must first measure it, and both those who measured and
those who guided and guarded them must be paid and paid well – with
land.
To Isaac Bledsoe and
other hunters who had explored and who knew the paths through the
wilderness, it was the opportunity of their lives. In 1779, Isaac
was back along the Cumberland, marking out boundaries through the
woods he had first explored seventeen years before.
Opening In The Forest - David Wright, Artist
Isaac was with James
Robertson in Harrodsburg, Kentucky when they learned that the
overmountain men had won a great victory over the British at Kings
Mountain and had them on the run. “Both Robertson and I were a foot
taller when we heard the work of Sevier and Shelby. We said to one
another, ‘If they can so handle the British and the Tories, can we
not whip the Indians in the woods?’” (4) Indeed they had to, for the
Cherokee and the other tribes were once more on the warpath.
In the winter of
1779-80 Isaac led the settlement of a dozen families around Bledsoes
Lick. For this service he received from North Carolina the grant of
several thousands of acres, as did his brother, Anthony. The
arrangement was that each family was to build on their separate but
nearby tract, and that all would cooperate to build a centrally
located fortified stockade on a hill above a spring overlooking the
Lick. In the long years of hunting, guiding and exploring Isaac had
never forgotten the Lick he discovered seven years earlier and he
now made plans to move Katherine and his growing family there to a
tidy two-story cabin on a hill to the south overlooking the lick
itself. While this and the stockade were under construction they
would shelter with their old friend Kasper Mansker in his stockade
eighteen miles down river.
Brother Anthony
settled his growing family in a smaller stockade two-and-one-half
miles north overlooking a spring branch and fertile bottoms and
called it Greenfield. Esquire John Morgan fortified three miles
further up Bledsoes Creek at the mouth of Dry Fork. As more settlers
trickled through Cumberland Gap then down through Kentucky the rich
valley of Bledsoe was cleared, cultivated and cabined. The Ziegler
family built two miles down and across the creek, James Winchester
two miles west atop the bluff above the old buffalo crossing, while
the Sanders and Whites built fortified stations up the tributary
Desheas Creek.
Tired of treaties
earnestly negotiated then casually broken, The Cherokee Nation took
particular offense at these squatters plowing up what they
considered to be their National Park. From the south came the even
more murderous Creeks, still supplied through the Gulf by the
British and abetted and aided by the Spanish in New Orleans. Not
satisfied with the pace of murder, a group of the younger and more
aggressive Cherokee broke away to form a new tribe, the Chickamauga,
located below Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga. The Choctaws and
even the Chickasaws to the west joined the tribal confederation
dedicated to scalping every white who tried to settle along the
Cumberland.
Tight Spot - David Wright, Artist
With the War with
Britain effectively over, the Cumberlanders had a far more serious
one on their hands, one which swirled around them daily and which
threatened their wives, children and homes. Despairing of help from
North Carolina or the Continental Congress, they realized they were
on their own. In May of 1780, at French Lick or Fort Nashborough,
250 men representing the seven stations signed the Cumberland
Compact, a document by which the settlements governed themselves
until North Carolina created Davidson County in 1783. Four years
later fewer than 100 of these signers were left in the settlements.
Harriett Arnow estimates that as many as two of three wives were
made widows by the Indians.
Yet others came to
replace them. Winding their ways through Kentucky or across
Cumberland Mountain, a few even tried it by river, down the
Tennessee and up the Cumberland. Most of these did not make it, as
they had to run the gauntlet of the Chickamaugas, who knew the
shoals better than they. By 1790 North Carolina realized that
settlement was the key to westward expansion and authorized the
clearing and fortification of a wagon trail from Knoxville to
Bledsoes, and the settlers were pouring in. The War with Britain was
over for now, but the Indian Wars, however, were only just begun
along Bledsoe Creek.
Avery Trace - Billie Wright Young, Artist
Oil Sketch for painting in progress of Bledsoes Fort
Artist’s conception based on archaeological dig at site
Bill Puryear
Next Month – A People
Governing Themselves
(1) Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1966,Vol 715 p. 62
(2) ibid
(3) Historic Sumner County, Tennessee, by Jay Guy Cisco, 1909, p.167,
as quoted by Walter Thomas
Durham in The Great Leap Westward, A
History of Sumner County Tennessee From Its Beginnings
to 1805
(4) John Carr, Early Times in Middle Tennessee, 1857, p.94
Bibliography:
In addition to the sources specifically cited above, I have
drawn generally from the following sources in writing this article:
Wynnewood ,1994, Walter T.Durham, Bledsoes Lick Historical
Association
The Southwest Territory, 1790-1796, Walter T. Durham, Rocky Mount
Historical Association, 1990
Daniel Smith, Walter T. Durham, Sumner County Library Board, 1976
Tennessee, The Dangerous Example, Watauga to 1849, Mary French
Caldwell, Aurora Publishers
Seedtime On The Cumberland, Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Macmillan
Company 1960
Historical Background of Bledsoe’s Lick, A Cooperative Project of
the Bledsoe’s Lick Historical Association, Sumner County and Middle
Tennessee State University, Project Director, Kevin E. Smith
Early History of Middle Tennessee, Edward Albright, 1908
Historic Sumner County, Tennessee, Jay Guy Cisco, 1909
Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia Publication 5 – March
1970, The Long Hunters
Early History of the South-West by General William Hall, The
South-Western Monthly, 1852
Draper Manuscripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison,
Wisconsin
History of Tennessee, The Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1887
Bledsoe Station:Archaeology, History, and the Interpretation of the
Middle Tennessee Frontier, 1770-1820, Kevin E. Smith, Tennessee
Historical Quarterly, Fall 2000, Vol 59, issue 3
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