History of Old
Sumner
Bledsoe’s Creek, Part Six - Attack and Counterattack, Chapter 2
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To be strong everywhere is to be
strong nowhere
-
Sun Tzu, 400 BC
The settlers along
Bledsoe Creek might well have regarded 1793 as their low point.
Their two leaders,
Anthony and Isaac Bledsoe had been assassinated by Indians. Isaac’s
widow, the plucky Katy Montgomery, was now left with a fort and a
family to manage. In a letter to her friend, General Smith,
Secretary of the Territory, she proposed to give it all up and
return over the mountains to safety if troops are not sent to
protect the vulnerable Cumberland settlements.
Anthony’s widow
married widower Nathaniel Parker and they combined their large
families at Greenfield Fort, which narrowly escaped destruction in
April, 1793 by some 250 Indians. Later that year she was intercepted
and threatened by a party of Indians while riding in company with
Robert Jones and Thomas Spencer along the trail from Walnutfield
Station to Greenfield. ‘The Indians opened fire and Jones fell dead
from his horse. With raised tomahawks they rushed toward his two
companions, but recognizing Spencer, of whom they stood in mortal
dread, called a halt. Ordering Mrs. Parker to turn her horse and run
toward Gallatin, Spencer covered her retreat by dashing back and
forth in front of the savages, pointing his gun as though he
intended to shoot. This was kept up until she was beyond their
reach. Then wheeling his own horse about Spencer followed his
companion to a place of safety.’ 1
Thomas ‘Bigfoot’
Spencer, a huge man whom the Indians feared and the settlers all
respected, was one of the first, if not the first, long hunter to
build, plant and settle Sumner County. He was thought by many to be
bulletproof, but was ambushed and killed while by Indians April 1,
1794, while crossing Cumberland Mountain at Crab Orchard.
Tragedy stalked the
Bledsoe family. In March 1794 two young sons of Anthony and Isaac,
both named Anthony, were killed while returning to Rock Castle,
General Daniel Smith’s home where they were boarding while attending
a nearby school on Drakes Creek. A month later, Thomas, son of Col.
Anthony Bledsoe, was surprised and mortally wounded near his
deceased father’s station at Greenfield. 2 The Bledsoes,
having received vast grants of land for their services in opening
the frontier, had paid a far greater price for it in blood.
Other settlers paid
the ultimate price as the killing continued through 1793 and 1794.
‘In the summer of
1793, James Steel, his daughter and son and his brother, Robert,
left Greenfield to go to Morgan’s station. William Hall and seven
others of the light horse were eating dinner when the Steels
announced they were leaving. Hall attempted to persuade the Steels
to wait until the soldiers could finish eating so they could serve
as an escort. James Steel insisted that there was no danger and
left.
The men were still at
dinner when gunshots were heard. Rushing down the road they found
James Steel lying dead, shot through the heart, and scalped. His
beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter Betsy was lying on the ground
mortally wounded and scalped. Her brother was wounded in the
shoulders but escaped with his Uncle Robert. 3 Betsy
apparently fought her attackers with her bare hands as they were
found cut and bleeding and clutching wisps of Indian hair. 4
The settlers, thinly
spread amongst their cabins and forts, daily sending their sons to
the fields, their daughters to the spring, their servants to clear
land, were in a perilous state, ill equipped for defense. They
fought back as best they could. In response to the urgent request of
Colonel James Winchester of Cragfont, General James Robertson
mustered a company of 80 cavalry and sent them east to intercept war
parties crossing the river from the Cherokee nation near present day
Gainesboro. Later Fort Blount was established here to guard the
crossing and to act as a way station for travelers along the Avery
Trace. 5
A few days later Old
Abraham, who had proved his mettle in the repulse of the attack at
Greenfield, was passing at nightfall from Bledsoe’s Lick up to
Greenfield. When in the midst of a dense thicket about halfway
between he came face to face with two well-known Cherokee Chiefs,
Maddog and John Taylor, the latter a half-breed known to many in
Nashville and a noted plunderer. Old Abe leveled his gun and fired,
killing Maddog dead at about ten paces and fled before John Taylor
recovered from the sudden firing.
Taylor carried away
and buried the body of his comrade. This done, he returned to his
nation, and was never seen again in the settlement. 6
Abraham, a slave who belonged to Anthony Bledsoe, and who had come
over the mountains with him was described by Gov. Hall as ‘one who
was really a very bright, intelligent fellow, who was indeed a good
soldier and marksman....7
These parries were not
enough to slow the brutality inflicted by the war parties roaming
the isolated settlements along Bledsoe. In separate attacks in
Sumner County the son of Hugh Strother on Station Camp Creek, Hugh
Webb, and a frontier spy along Bledsoe Creek were all killed. 8
Then on the morning of
July 9, 1794, Major George Winchester, commander of the local
Militia and brother to General James Winchester of Cragfont, was on
his way from Bledsoe’s Lick to a meeting of the Sumner County
Quarterly Court, of which he was a member. As he neared Gallatin, at
the junction of present day Hartsville and Scottsville Pikes, he was
ambushed, killed and scalped. He was the last, but by one, to be
thus killed, according to Colonel William Martin, the sometimes
blunt commentator, who described him as “…a superior man in every
way to the General.” 9
The crowd assembling
for the court meeting in Gallatin was outraged when the news reached
them, and a company of fifty men was assembled by Major George
Blackmore to pursue the murderers. But with their head start and
freshly stolen horses, the Indians were back across the river into
their nation and sanctuary before the militia could overtake them.
Scarcely a family had
escaped the brutal loss of one or more members, and the settlements
were by now in an uproar for revenge. Petitions with names of the
murdered gathered dust in the new nation’s capitol, where the
congress was composed of members from seaboard states, protected by
the Appalachian Mountains from the savagery of the frontier.
President George Washington urged peaceful negotiation of
differences with the tribes and respect for their lands.
Tennessee Governor
Blount in Knoxville continued to have faith in the councils and
negotiations he was still conducting with the belligerent tribes,
and lent a listening ear to all made-to-order ‘peace talks’ from the
chiefs. On April 15th 1794 he wrote General James Robertson as
follows: “An attack on Cumberland by a large party of Indians,
either Creeks or Cherokees, or both, is not to be apprehended this
summer. Small parties, however, I fear will yet infest your
frontier. I entreat and command you to let neither opportunity nor
distant appearances of danger induce you to order out any party of
the militia unnecessarily large. Economy is a republican virtue
which from the injunction laid upon me by the Secretary of War I
feel myself bound to enjoin on you the observance of.” 10
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Governor William Blount |
General James Robertson - Tennessee State Museum |
James Robertson,
General and chosen leader of the Cumberlanders, was himself no
stranger to the violence and treachery of his enemies. He had lost
two brothers and two sons to the Indian ambushes and attacks. A
third son was scalped and he himself was attacked and wounded in the
foot and in both wrists. Notwithstanding his personal losses, he was
a peacemaker, and his 1781 agreement with Piomongo, respected Chief
of the Chickasaws, resulted in permanent peace and alliance with
that tribe, which still maintains a presence today in West
Tennessee. He hosted a 1783 Council of Peace at his farm on what is
now Charlotte Pike in Nashville with the chiefs and head warriors of
the four southern tribes – Cherokee, Creeks, Choctaws, and
Chickasaws. Lacking unified governance, the Indians soon splintered
into factions and resumed their attacks. 11
All descriptions of
his personality point to and who was soft spoken and even-tempered,
a person who maintained an inner composure regardless of external
circumstances. He had plenty of opportunity to demonstrate it.
Forced by speculators to vacate the land he had settled, plowed and
forted, he moved to a new farm and started over. There he patiently
set about working his contacts in the North Carolina Legislature to
secure pre-emptions and grants for those hundreds of similarly
displaced settlers – those who had secured with blood and sweat the
land which speculators who had stayed in North Carolina secured with
their pens and patronage.
Even a patient man has
limits, and Robertson’s had been reached. The American Revolution,
had lasted six long years; the wars with the southern Indian tribes
had by 1794 been raging fourteen years, more than twice as long.
Furthermore, after Tennessee had contributed so much to that effort,
not least at King’s Mountain where they gave the British Southern
Campaign its first defeat and launched Cornwallis on a course which
ultimately ended at Yorktown, the fledgling United States, now
sheltered by the Appalachians, seemed unconcerned and unwilling to
offer much more than advice to the frontiersmen, who were daily in
peril of their lives.
It was time to take
matters into their own hands. Only a bold counterstroke , similar to
that at King’s Mountain, could end the war. The Western Frontiersmen
would have to turn once more to their only reliable source of help –
themselves. James Robertson set about raising an expeditionary
force.
From Kentucky came
troops under Colonel Whitley. Col. John Montgomery (Mrs. Isaac
Bledsoe’s brother) raised a company near Clarksville, Colonel Ford
levied troops in what is now Robertson County, and James Robertson
himself raised troops in Davidson County. Major George Blackmore
called for recruits in Sumner, and volunteers included William
Trousdale, later Governor of Tennessee, Hugh Rogan, Stephen
Cantrell, Thomas Maury, and William Pillow. 12
In the meantime
Governor Blount had detached Major Ore, of East Tennessee, with a
command of sixty men to range along the Cumberland Mountains, and
thus aid in preventing the Indians crossing the Mero District.
However, for reasons never satisfactorily explained to the War
Department, Ore’s men kept going until they rendezvoused with the
other troops assembled at Brown’s Block House, two miles east of
Buchanan’s Station. 12
The combined troops
amounted to some five hundred fifty men. On the morning of September
7th they began their southward march. The target was the lower towns
of the Cherokee - Nickajack and Running Water towns - under the
shadow of Lookout Mountain. Here were gathered renegades from the
Creeks and Cherokee Tribes, outlaws, half-breeds, murderers and
younger Indians who had rebelled against the admonitions of their
chiefs and elders. This polyglot called themselves Chickamaugas,
which translated as “River of Blood’, and for fourteen years
Nickajack had been the place where the marauders upon the Cumberland
settlements had been supplied by the British and Spanish and from
which they staged their bloody excursions. 12
Nickajack Cave
Joseph Brown, who had
been captured by the Chickamaugas when his family’s boat foundered
on the shoals years before, guided the army to a point several miles
down the Tennessee River from Nickajack. There the men built rafts
for their supplies, swam their horses across the river on the
morning of the 13th, and moved into the village of Nickajack under
Lookout Mountain, taking the warriors and inhabitants by complete
surprise. The left wing moved downriver cutting off retreat .The
warriors in Running Water, hearing the firing, move to the relief of
their comrades in Nickajack, but were met by Ore’s men moving along
the road. A battle ensued, in which the Indians suffered great loss
and scattered to the mountains, never to return to the lower
villages. 12
Seventy Indians were
killed, twenty captured and two hundred put to the rout. The
villages were burned and horses, guns, food and military supplies
furnished by the Spanish and British were carried back to the
settlements. A single member of the expedition was killed and two
others were wounded. The destructive power of the Chickamauga was
destroyed, and, isolated incidents notwithstanding, the
fourteen-year Indian wars were over. 12
Next Issue – Classicism on
the Cumberland
1 Early
History of Middle Tennessee, Edward Albright, Chapter 36, Events of
1793
2 Ibid., Chapter 37, Events of 1794.
3 William Hall, Early History of the Southwest,
Published by The South-Western Monthly, 1852,
reprinted 1968 by The Edward Ward Carmack Sumner County Public
Library, Nashville, 1968.
4 Draper MSS, 32S 485
5 Durham ibid pp
6 Albright, ibid, Chap 36
7 Hall, ibid, p.27
8 Durham, ibid, p119
9 Draper MSS p855
10 Albright, ibid, Chap 37
11 Ibid, Chaps 22, 24
12 Ibid, Chap 38
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