Stories about my Father - 33
One night, in the spring of 1782, a group of Cherokee warriors raided a white farm station in Crab Orchard, Kentucky, and stole all the horses. The next day, leaving the women and children behind, the men from the fort set off to get them back.
At the cabin belonging to Michael Woods, one of my 6th great-grandfathers, his children had been left under the supervision of their mother and an enslaved African man with a lame hand. There was one other sick white man who was bedridden in a nearby cabin. While everyone was out chasing the Cherokees, the kids went back and forth to the spring to fetch water and do their usual daily chores. Strangely, each time they got near the spring, the dog would growl, but they ignored him.
Close to dinner time, my 5th great-grandmother, Hannah went with her little brother John to gather some salad fixings in a nearby meadow. Suddenly, she came across a group of Cherokees coming up the path from the spring. She sounded the alarm. The African man got the smaller children into the house but before he could bar the door, the Cherokee leader was on him, and they started fighting. Hannah’s mother, also named Hannah, grabbed an axe, and buried it in the skull of the attacker. The younger Hannah ran with her bother to the cabin next door and roused the sick man enough that he was able to shoot another of the Cherokees. With their leader and one of their party dead, the rest of the raiders grabbed the bodies and fled.
In her application to the Daughters of the American Revolution, my grandmother mentions that story. Online, I found another account of the same incident, but this one, claims that the girl who alerted the sick white man next door was not young Hannah, but her sister Polly.
Family stories from this far back have usually strayed far from the path of truth after several generations and centuries of retelling. Even some of the things my father told me don’t always make sense when you really start to look at the facts. I don’t know where my grandmother heard her version of the story, but the account online came out of oral history from sister Polly’s granddaughter years after the fact. She’d heard the tale many times from her father. I don’t know how reliable a storyteller, Polly’s granddaughter was. Looking at the facts, it seems to me that the version I related above, my grandmother’s version, makes the most sense. In 1782, young Hannah was 14, and sister Polly was only 2. That the story pops up in several places in historical records gives it some credence, but I can’t imagine how we will ever get the honest-to-God true version of it.
The Cherokee people had originally been farmers who’d settled along the river valleys of the southeastern United States in what is now North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and northern South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. As the European colonists started grabbing their land, the Cherokee got pushed further and further west. Today, there is the Eastern Band of Cherokee who still lives in North Carolina and two Western Bands of Cherokees in Oklahoma. The Western Bands ended up in Oklahoma because of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The ancestors of the Eastern Band were tribespeople who resisted the removal.
Kentucky did not become a state until 1792. Before that, the Cherokee had been pushed into parts of it that had traditionally been under the control of the Chickasaw and the Shawnee. During the 1700s, the Shawnees allied themselves with the French colonists, but the Cherokee and Chickasaw came together and allied themselves with the British. In 1763, to keep the tribes as allies, King George III of England issued a Royal Proclamation that forbade British settlers from establishing themselves west of the Appalachian Mountains. By 1763, however, American colonists were already not paying attention to the crown and moved in on the territory anyway. The colonist in this region of Kentucky we remember the most from this time was Daniel Boone.
Daniel Boone is famous in our history and folklore as a frontiersman. A whole mythology has been built up around him, much of which ends up on very shaky ground when it comes to actual historical facts. In 1769, however, we know that he set out on a two-year expedition to explore the rich hunting grounds of Kentucky. He was captured by the Shawnee who confiscated all the skins he’d acquired and told him to never return. He ignored the warning and kept going. The passage through the Cumberland Gap that he discovered into the Bluegrass region was eventually the one used by hundreds of thousands of European settlers.
In 1773, Boone, along with his family, brother, and about 50 other people, began the first attempt to grab the rich and fertile Native American land there. In the fall of that year, Boone’s oldest son James, along with several other would-be colonialists and some enslaved Africans were attacked, tortured, and killed by a band of Cherokees, Delawares, and Shawnees. This set off what came to be known as Dunmore’s War. By the end of 1774, Boone and the colonists had won. The Shawnee gave up their claims to the land in Kentucky and the war was over. When the American Revolution started the following year, the tribes then sided with the British hoping that a defeat of the colonists would mean that they could get their land back.
My 5th great-grandfather James Hutton Jr. was born in 1761 in Augusta, Virginia. That same year, his grandmother, Sarah Lightfoot Hutton wrote her will in which she says:
“First, I give and bequeath unto my son John Hutton (James Jr’s uncle) the sum of Twenty Shillings money of Pennsylvania to be allowed out of the money which he my son oweth unto me. Also, I give and bequeath unto my son James Hutton (Sr.) the sum of Twenty Shillings money aforesaid to be paid by my Executor herein after named; (and it is my desire that it may not be judged by any, that these small sums left to my sons is either on account of disobedience in them to me, or disaffection in me to them; but knowing the large share they enjoy of their Father’s estate and that it was so left by their Father to enable them to hold his lands, which otherwise he thought they could not; for this reason I judge it just and reasonable to me to dispose of the chief part of my estate to my daughters…“
She would live through the Revolution and pass away in 1783. Whatever the value of the land that his father James Sr. inherited, James Hutton, Jr. would either not share in it or else he wanted something more because he left Virginia and ended up in Kentucky.
In 1776, while still in Virginia and only 15 or 16 years old, he enlisted and served for three months as an ensign in Captain Isaac Shelby’s Company and in Shelby’s father, Colonel Evans Shelby’s, Virginia Regiment. After that, he joined up with Colonel William Christian of the 1st Virginia Regiment.
William Christian was the brother-in-law of Patrick Henry, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Henry was the original leader of the 1st Virginia Regiment, but when it was absorbed into the Continental Army he withdrew, and William Christian assumed the command. When the Cherokees led by Dragging Canoe and Oconostota aligned with the British and declared war on Virginia in 1776, Christian led an expedition against the Cherokees and James Hutton went with him.
There wasn’t much fighting during this period, but the colonial force destroyed many Cherokee towns. There must have been a concerted effort to eradicate the tribe because eventually, the Cherokees sued for peace. Col. Christian oversaw the signing of the Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston in Tennessee on July 20, 1777.
After that, James continued fighting with Col. Evan Shelby’s Virginia Regiment. In March of 1780, James moved to Kentucky to a place near McGary Station. Hugh McGary was among the initial group of settlers who had come in with Daniel Boone.
In August of 1782, a British-Indian force defeated the Kentucky militia at the Battle of Blue Licks. This was 10 months after the British General Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown supposedly ending the Revolutionary war. The person who was blamed for the Blue Licks defeat was General George Rogers Clark who wasn’t even present. Many feel that the blame should, instead, have been placed on Hugh McGary. He survived the battle whereas most of the others in his company were killed.
In response, in November of 1782, General Clark, himself, led 1,000 men, including my 5th great-grandfather James Hutton on an expedition deep into Ohio country along the Great Miami River. They obliterated several Native American villages including the Shawnee village of Piqua, killing five tribesmen in the process. This expedition is considered to be the last of the American Revolution.
With the war over, James seems to have left the army and started running his farm. In 1791, James Hutton and William Woods entered into an agreement under which James agreed to marry William’s sister, Hannah Woods. Hannah, of course, is the daughter of Michael and Hannah Woods who had encountered and fought off the Cherokees on their farmstead when she was a kid.
While a few members of my grandmother’s family may have moved to other places, for the most part, Kentucky is where they stayed. It’s where my grandmother was eventually born four generations later. All the farms that my ever-expanding family will come to own will be on land that my 5th great-grandfather helped to steal from the tribes who had been living there.
Would the Cherokee and the Chickasaw and the Shawnee have fared better if they’d fought against the British instead of the colonists? I doubt it. The second that Daniel Boone stood in the Cumberland Gap and looked out over the magnificent Bluegrass prairies stretching out before him, the fate of that land was sealed. The Europeans were going to take it all.
The tribes survived but they were pushed ever further west into land that was far less desirable to the Europeans. Oklahoma was useless as farmland, so it was fine that the Cherokees ended up there. Fine, of course, until oil was struck.
The American Revolution was fought over who got to control land and resources that neither side had proprietary rights to. Michael and I went to see a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the other day. Before the play started there was an announcement acknowledging that the land the theatre was standing on had been stolen from the Leni Lenape people. Those kinds of announcements are usual in Australia where the British treated the Aboriginal people in the same way that they treated the Native Americans here. They’ve just started to become part of our usual pre-show ritual here. It’s something, I suppose, but it does seem a bit like the shocking pictures of cancer victims that are required to be printed on the outside of cigarette packs. As gruesome as they are, they don’t seem to be stopping anyone from smoking.
We aren’t going to give the land back. Really, where on this planet would you start with that kind of reparations? It’s happened everywhere to everyone. Even the pre-invasion Native Americans and the Aboriginals fought each other over territory. As human beings, we simply aren’t wired for anything else. We take what we want.
We can’t go back and erase what happened, but we can and should be aware of it. All we can do is keep moving forward and ceaselessly try to fail better.
Fascinating! The fact that you possess these documents blows my mind.