Chap. XXVII.} 1766. Oct. |
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man's City of Refuge,1 where the wilderness guarded
his cabin as inviolably as the cliff or the cedar-top holds the eagle's eyrie.
The few who occupied lands under grants from the Crown, could rely only on themselves for the protection of their property, and refused to pay quit-rents till their legal right should be acknowledged.
The line of ‘straggling settlements’ beyond the mountains, extended from Pittsburg up the Monongahela2 and its tributaries to the banks of the Greenbriar and the New River,3 and to the well-known upper valley of the Holston,4 where the military path from Virginia led to the country of the Cherokees.
But as yet there was no settlement in Kentucky, and James Smith, who, with three others from Pennsylvania, went this year from the Holston, by way of Cumberland River, to the Ohio, and so to the mouth of the Tennessee, left no memorial of his passing by but the name of Stone, one of his companions, which he gave to a branch above Nashville.5 Most of the party proceeded to the country of the Illinois.
In North Carolina, the people along the upland frontier, many of whom had sprung from Scotch-Irish
1 Fauquier to Earl of Shelburne, 15 Nov. 1766.
2 For the Official Papers of 1766, respecting the settlements on the Monongahela, especially at Redstone, see the Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. IX. Compare also, J. L. Bowman in the American Pioneer, for February, 1843; Craig's History of Pittsburg, 98, 99; Day's Historical Collections of Pennsylvania, 336.
3 Compare Monette's History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi, i. 345.
4 That lands in the Holston Valley were sought for as early as 1756, see the proof in Ramsay's Annals of Tennessee, 66.
5 Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Colonel James Smith, by himself. Reprinted in 1849, at Abingdon, Va., in Mirror of Olden Time Border Life. This narrative is adopted by John Haywood in his Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee, from its earliest Settlement up to the year 1796, 35, 36. Ramsay in his Annals of Tennessee, 69, adopts Smith's narrative from Haywood. Collins in the chronological table to his Historical Sketches of Kentucky, accepts it also.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
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