Men were farmers, fathers, hunters, and soldiers. Women inherited all the incredible backbreaking labor of the primitive frontier. The Anglo-Celts arrived with perhaps a few spoons, an axe, and only the most essential minor tools. They were forced to buy a rifle and metals and salt. Almost everything else they made themselves. It was in no sense an easy life, and it was one that never should have been romanticized. In its time and place, like most successful institutions, frontier life was necessary.
Children were not particularly ornamental, but useful. They were needed for the secondary tasks about the farm. Whenever possible, they were given essential schooling: the Bible, some writing, and simple arithmetic. Oddly, even frontier America in the mid-18th century was more literate, in the literal sense, than the old country. But children quickly had to put aside childish things. When a boy was big enough to hold a gun, he was taught to shoot. When a girl was big enough to marry, she was often considered old enough. There seems to have been little rebellion inside the Anglo-Celt family; in any event, children were pushed on their own soon enough. Family tension, like problems of social order, required a certain amount of affluence or leisure to sprout. The frontier family was functional, and maturity came earlier than it would probably ever arrive again. Work, hunger, danger, and terror could not be kept or disguised from young people. It was impossible for a boy or girl to create a false, or romantic, vision of the world. In terms of its own reality, the Allegheny world was vastly sophisticated. No Anglo-Celt child reached physical maturity without seeing babies born and people hurt, animals slaughtered and old folks die.
In Ireland, the native Scots had acquired some Huguenot and Irish blood. Crossing Pennsylvania and congregating against the barrier Appalachians, the strain became more mixed. There was an infusion of both Germanic and English stock. Here, actual national origins blurred. The Huguenot name Maury was soon thought of as English. Surnames like Boone, Frisbe, Forbes, Crockett, Reed, and Houston lost their Scottish connotation. Many Pennsylvania Dutch joined the clans, and became Celticized as Rohrbaugh or Ferenbaugh. The old American names of Wentz and Utterback seemed to cease being German. All of these, American English–speaking, Puritan Protestant, and culturally Calvinistic, were blending into a great population mass of Northern stock that would finally be termed Anglo-Saxon in the United States.
They tended to be a tall, very Caucasoid race, more rawboned than wiry.
They filled the ridges and valleys with fair-skinned people and blue-eyed children, and two centuries later huge enclaves of their stock would still remain. Their birthrate was phenomenal, by any standard. Life was hard, but the climate was moderate; food was plentiful most years, and the valleys were far from pestilential cities and human crowding. Two generations before Europe learned of sanitation, Appalachia was enjoying certain of its effects. Ten children to a family were common, and the majority survived. The Anglo-American population increase, in the 18th century, was far higher than the birthrates of Spain, Britain, or even fertile France. It was higher than that of any region in the 20th-century world, including the Orient or Middle America. Here, on the threshold of what a French historian called the "Anglo-Saxon centuries," this remarkable increase was regarded by the Latin world with despair.
In 1750, almost all frontier people who professed a religion, or were churched, claimed Scots Presbyterianism. But the formal persuasion was eroding in the backwoods, and not more than a small minority of the American-born generations were churched. The Church itself suffered enormously in this century, not only from theological contradictions but from an inability to adjust itself to its people on the frontier. Presbyterianism was essentially urban in outlook, and it was not to inherit the American frontier. The newer denominations of Baptists and Methodists soon took the region for their own. But the Anglo-Celt polity and outlook suffused those religions and stamped them immutably; Baptistry and Methodism, on the frontier, were very much Puritanism reorganized to fit society. The Calvinistic code remained. Even Episcopacy, when it leaped the mountains at last, seemed to absorb an indelible Calvinist stain. The striking Puritanism of the inner South, so odd against the easy Anglicanism of the tidewater coast, did not, as some supposed, suffuse down from New England. It came from Ireland, via Pennsylvania.
If the old Church fragmented in the Cumberlands, it still achieved immortality of a sort, for its ethic dominated. Organic Anglicanism was left behind.
As the second half of the century began, a tremendous American-born generation of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen was crowding its valleys to capacity. As land was then used, eroded, and abandoned, and as the hated writs from the coastal counties began to appear, the Appalachian region was threatening to explode. The excess could have drifted back to the tidewater, or added to the growing cities. There was more than enough room in this still-dawning America. But the backwoods generation was unequipped, and more important, mentally unprepared, to enter Deferential Civilization. Jammed between the endless forest, the savage unknown beyond the mountains, and encroaching Anglo-America in their rear, they had only one place to go. The New Jerusalem, whatever each man sought, did not lie behind him.
The Presbyterian Irish—never "Irish" and no longer Presbyterian—of America had turned their backs on the whole panorama of their cultural history. They retained only its tools and an ethic, abandoning bishops and baronets, pageantry, paganism, and Bach. The world they abandoned was already in a crisis of rationale, stretching from Koenigsberg to Philadelphia, when they departed with their 17th-century values intact. But they would be only dimly affected by either Paine or Rousseau. They were withdrawing from European time, and from ideas as remote from their experience as dance steps at Versailles or Hampton Court.
They were not going to retreat. They were poised to attack, a tough, hungry, numerous, riotous, and yet curiously disciplined horde. They were moving out of cultural time, to devour limitless space. They had no banners, armies, or grand leaders, no real rationale for conquest. They had their long rifles and sad songs, their fiddlers and graybeards, their chopping axes and their essentially gloomy grasp of life. McAfees, Bryans, McGees, McConnells, Harlans, Boones, Logans, and Clarks; Maurys, Autrys, Wetzels, and Wentzes—De Riencourt, the French historian who was both fascinated and appalled by these folk, tried to describe them:
Strong, inhumanly self-reliant, endowed with an ecstatic dryness of temper which brushed aside the psychological complexities of mysticism, these puritans were geared for a life of action. They shunned objective contemplation and were determined to throw their fanatical energy into this struggle against Nature . . . they fought their own selves with gloomy energy, repressing instincts and emotions, disciplining their entire lives . . . remorselessly brushing aside all men who stood in their path.
No Anglo-Celt would have understood the elegant Riencourt. They had no real intention of destroying the Wilderness, or any people who lived in it. Their own sayings were "God helps them who help themselves," "There's no such thing as luck," and "Devil take the hindmost," and they were going West.
Chapter 7
THE WAY WEST
. . . The West became the mainstay of American power and vigor, the home of an Americanism that looked down on the slightly decadent Easterners who stayed behind.
AMAURY DE RIENCOURT
IN the folklore of inner America the real history of the United States did not begin at Philadelphia; it commenced when a thirty-five-year-old Anglo-Celt named Daniel Boone crossed over the barrier mountains and scouted the grasslands of Kentucky, in 1769.
Boone was not the first Anglo-American to see Kentucky or to reach the Mississippi. The Cumberland Gap had already been found and named. Other men had put outposts along the river. But Boone went back to North Carolina and brought his family and a party of pioneers across the mountains, who came to stay. He was big, sinewy, and typical, born in Pennsylvania in 1734, reared in Carolina, a restless child of the old frontier. He was a great man in his way. There were a hundred, maybe a thousand, B
oones nurturing in Appalachia—but he was the first to break a permanent trail and to create a settlement beyond the mountains that was completely isolated from the East. He was instrumental in founding this colony, and in preserving it during some desperate years.
Kentucky was a country of striking beauty, green limestone hills, broken forests, and meadows rich with buffalo, bear, and deer. It lacked the gloomy, endless forests farther south, or the sullen, black-soiled prairies to the north and west. Boone and his people, who were more hunters and trappers than real farmers, fell in love with the country.
The land south of the Ohio was not closely held by any Indian tribe. It had become a sort of buffer and battleground between the mountain Cherokees and forest Creeks below the Tennessee, and the less civilized but more warlike Algonkian Amerinds to the north. The really dangerous tribes, Wyandots, Miamis, and Shawnees, lived north of the Ohio. All these made forays into the lands between. Kentucky was dangerous ground.
The desperate distances involved and the dangers of carving settlements out of this wilderness have faded with time. The people who remained East, even the frontiersmen up against Appalachia, stayed in another world. This world could not even assist the pioneers in the crucial years; in fact, embroiled in its troubles with the British, it paid them little attention. The tremendous Trans-Appalachian empire between the mountains and the Mississippi was won almost unnoticed by the people on the coast.
Historians have accumulated many theories as to what made Boone's people go. But it seems safe to say that the migration was due as much to the Anglo-Celtic borderer instinct as economic reasons or the press of population. There were no fortunes to be made in the wilds by frontiersmen. There was no gold or silver or precious minerals. There was boundless land, but a man could only use the land he worked himself. Boone's people wanted to see the other side of the mountain; they had no strong ties with Anglo-American civilization, and they were not afraid of war.
Certainly, the armed migration westward was no part of the Enlightenment or rational theories of human government evolving on the coast. As its manifestos clearly show, 18th-century America was not imperial. The invasion of the Trans-Appalachian West was no result of policy of any government, American or British. In fact, this human explosion was in many ways contradictory to American thought and theory as it was being formulated in the East. The Anglo-American historical experience was to be this: the people moved outward, on their own, and they sucked their government along behind, whether it wanted to go or not. This experience, from the first, was radically different from either the Spanish or the French.
No iron-willed Washington or idealistic Jefferson, pledged to defend the rights of man forever before the altar of God, guided or shaped this emigration. They had the keen good sense, in time, to take advantage of it. And even then, the notion that Anglo-America should dominate its continent, and take all the owned, but empty, lands from sea to sea for its own advantage and protection, was not universally adopted or admired by millions in the East.
However, more and more anthropologists believe that the desire to expand, to seize territory and hold it, is a human instinct easily aroused, and one that requires no rationalization. It is only when the rationalization is attempted that hypocrisy enters in. Ironically, the Amerinds understood blood and soil; many of the people who destroyed them did not. In fact, if many of the ideas and arguments expressed in Anglo-America concerning peace and human rights had been dominant, it is not inconceivable to contemplate a United States still cramped behind the Alleghenies, complaining to world opinion about Amerind raids.
The way into Kentucky was hard. Even the passage was disputed; Boone's oldest son was killed coming through the mountains, in 1773. This pattern was repeated; the accounts of many early parties show that they had brushes with the Indians coming through. If the frontiersmen had not already had considerable experience fighting Indians, the early Kentucky and Tennessee settlements could not have survived. But Indian wars had been endemic on the borders of Anglo-America since the first white men pushed their way onto the continent, and it had not been many years since Massachusetts and other colonies had paid bounties for all Indian hair. All Appalachia had been Indian ground when the Scotch-Irish moved up against it; Indian fighting was part of the folk culture of Daniel Boone.
However, the first Trans-Appalachian generation was isolated as no other. It was not so much an extension of civilization beyond a contiguous frontier as an armed intrusion into hostile territory. The experience certainly shaped this generation, and the one that followed. The men born in the late 18th century and the early 19th on the middle border were probably the toughest, and toughest-minded, in American history. As Toynbee and other historians pointed out, life in direct proximity to the Indian frontier was savage, and the frontiersman could not help but be brutalized. Yet this brutalization was held within reasonable limits, because with the exception of Kentucky the fighting frontier proved to be ephemeral, and the English-speaking peoples developed a unique attitude toward the native Amerinds.
The Indians were not considered human beings by the average frontiersman. In this way their title to the land was obviated without any need for ideological reasons such as the Spanish employed, and their suppression could be carried out without moral qualms. Killing Indians, to the frontiersman, was hardly more meaningful than killing catamounts or bears. They were all natural obstacles to his full development and enjoyment of the land.
However, there was no notion of deliberate extermination among the whites. They wanted two things: to be left alone by Indians, and for the Indians to move out of the way. The warlike traditions of the Indians and the white determination to preempt the land of course made war inevitable.
Indian warfare buttressed the frontier people's moral case. It was based on stealth, treachery, guerrilla tactics, and marked by ferocious cruelty to its victims. There were no humanizing codes or protocols, and few prisoner exchanges. Captives of the Indians were normally mutilated, emasculated, and burnt alive. It was one thing to hold a rational discussion about the brotherhood of man over a glass of Madeira in Philadelphia, but quite another to look on the blackened results of an Indian atrocity. Sympathy for the Indians existed in a marked progression back from the frontier. The frontiersmen's outlook was simple and followed a pattern. When he was weak or outnumbered, he tried to make peace with the Indians. When he was stronger, he sought to have them removed. In virtually every case the frontier people were successful in their basic aims. The true hypocrisy rested with a long succession of United States governments.
The Anglo-American frontierspeople were completely successful in establishing the moral superiority this protracted warfare required. They themselves suffered no trauma or self-doubt. They did leave a certain trauma to their descendants, and to Americans without a frontier heritage, because they never bothered to develop a ready rationale.
The frontier folk were splendidly equipped for the struggle. They had the inherited experience and organizational skills of European civilization. They had basic organizational discipline and the understanding of long-term goals, which the Indians completely lacked. The Indian's society was utterly democratic; no man had to obey any chief's orders for long or suffer if it did not suit him. The whites in time of danger could voluntarily forgo their freedoms and cooperate. The fact that during Indian uprisings no man could fail to muster was not entirely due to understanding the demands of common defense—frontier society did not tolerate any other course.
The Indians understood the country better, but the Anglo-American white was immensely adaptive. It was already an American characteristic to avoid rationales for action but to do what came naturally in the most pragmatic fashion. The Anglo-Celt might have been stubborn in his basic convictions toward the world, but he changed artifacts and techniques easily. These Americans took agronomy from the Indians, and quickly adapted their warfare to the foe. Men like Boone or Wetzel, a legendary Indian-killer, could track like Indians, a
nd meet the savages tomahawk to tomahawk. They saw the advantages of the Indian tomahawk over pike or sword in the forest, and soon made better ones of iron. But the characteristic weapon of the frontier was also borrowed from outside the British experience. This was the Central European rifle.
The rifle had been used as a hunting and target weapon in the Central European forests and mountains for generations, and it was carried to Pennsylvania by German immigrants. The Scotch-Irish immediately saw its superiority for their purposes over the smoothbore musket and created an enormous demand. Thousands were forged in Pennsylvania, and it was also made as far south as the Carolinas, wherever the frontier ran.
This Pennsylvania (later called Kentucky) rifle was very heavy and very long, as tall as a man. It was small-bored, about .32 caliber, and forged from soft iron and fitted with a short, awkward, wooden stock. It was ungainly but immensely accurate up to 200 meters or more. The rifle's characteristics made it unsuited for formal military use, because of the tactics adopted at the time. It was difficult to load, and most effective when fired from a rest. It was perfectly suited for the western hills and forests of America, where combat was decentralized and individual, where there was plenty of cover, and men fought from concealment, lying down. This weapon made the American frontiersman the most formidable fighter and predator, on his own ground, of the time.
The rifle remained purely a frontier weapon. The tidewater militias, like continental armies, were armed with smoothbore muskets, some dating back to Queen Anne's day. New Englanders first saw the Pennsylvania rifle when Dan Morgan's Virginia backwoodsmen marched to the siege of Boston in 1775.
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