CHAPTER IV.

ENGLISH EXPLORATIONS IN THE VALLEY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

While Spanish visitors to the Valley in the sixteenth century were in search of treasures which would enrich the adventurer, and of kingdoms worthy to be conquered and Christianized by the sword, and French enterprises looked to permanent occupation through alliance with, and conversion of, the Indians by persuasion, the English intruder paid no more attention to the natives than was unavoidable, and rather sought a home than the realization of far-reaching plans. He was not an adventurer but an emigrant; he was founding a commonwealth in diligent, serious earnest. This was a

very moder feature and indicated a rapid evolution of the principles o rue civilization.

The revolt ainst the foolish and repressive policy of European governments was based in England on a widespread intelligence and the resolute character of the individual Englishman. In France it was a flowing and ebbing wave that now yielded passively to obstacles and again gathered all its strength to rush against and overthrow them. During the first three quarters of the eighteenth century the French people were gathering their energies for one of these fearful upheavals in the last quarter; and the English in America were growing up into strength to found liberal institutions. modeled on those of the mother country. When the time came they stood up to assert and defend their liberties with quiet and resolute dignity-without wrath but also without fear.

Such was the progress of the eighteenth century. It laid the foundations for an admirable Republic in America and

for a transformation of Europe no less remarkable in the nineteenth century. We may consider the Anglo-American as the leading representative of civilization. The isolation in a common comparative poverty, community of dangers, struggles against difficulties, and the disappearance of the more glaring social distinctions from ordinary life, tended to consolidate the colonies, to increase their sense of justice, to make them considerate and impartial in sympathy. If the Anglo-American was far from being complete in these virtues, they were yet comparatively strong in him. They did not give him the suave courtesy and politeness of the French, but his good will was hearty and real.

Yet, notwithstanding his desire to deal fairly with the Indians, according to his own rather stiff notions of fairness, he rarely lived on really pleasant terms with them long at a time, at least on any other base than that of fear. He made no attempt to reduce them to servitude like the Spanish, he did not often try to make tools of them like the French, and generally was willing to give them what he considered an equivalent for the lands he occupied, though oen driving a very hard bargain with the thoughtless and unbusiness-like natives, who, when they realized all the results, were apt to repudiate it as great injustice.

With such a revolt of the Indian he had little sympathy, holding that a bargain once made was irrevocable, and punishing Indian disregard of such arrangements with stern severity. He could not enter into the feelings of the Indian like the Frenchman, and humor his weaknesses or his ignorance, and the Indian quite failed to appreciate civilized virtues. His quiet, unceasing industry and the steady, resistless spread of his settlements, were full of menace and terror to the Indian. The wild hunter, to whom he had no essential ill will, but to whom a sudden change of habits was impossible, was obliged to retire before him. The favorite fields and forests, where his fathers had roved without restraint, were soon con

CAUSES OF INDIAN HOSTILITY TO AMERICANS.

185

verted into farms and dotted with villages and towns. The Indian's eye was offended by the sight of a smiling plenty so agreeable to the civilized man, and his heart swelled with fear and rage when he saw the pioneers of this formidable emigration prospecting over his cherished hunting grounds in the Valley.

The English were neither roving in search of fabulous wealth nor seeking for allies; they were building a future— too busy and too strong to court or fear the Indian. If he retaliated on the whites, by bloody massacres, the loss of his woods and prairies, he was punished with unrelenting severity and obliged to move farther away. The order, the freedom, the prosperity of the Anglo-American, was the doom of the wild hunter. He would none of it, he loathed and cursed it and fled before it, after having, by many a vengeful deed of blood, sought in vain to stay the tide of prosperous civilization. Thus the English exploration of the Valley was met by the most determined hostility and the progress of settlement could be maintained only by an approach to the extermination of the Indian tribes.

Even the haughty and bloody Spaniard drew out toward himself from the Indian heart a less deep and bitter resentment than did the English explorer and settler. The Indians were warriors themselves, accustomed to cruel and barbarous deeds, and could appreciate and admire the brilliant courage and prowess of the roving Spaniards, who seldom allowed victory to escape them. They also were accustomed to follow victory by slaughter and the slavery of the captives; and, notwithstanding the more rational and more politic French style of making converts to the faith and gaining over the Indians to their interest, instead of crushing opposition by brute force, these gallant gentlemen and devoted priests could be ruthless and cruel to their enemies in a style quite appreciable to the Indian, for the old spirit of the crusades and the inquisition had not yet wholly died out in this vigor

ous Catholic race. Though turned into a new channel by the exquisitely skillful and subtle policy of the Jesuits and the still more humane spirit of other Catholic priests, it still remained to persecute and proscribe the Huguenot, and to add the intensity of hate to the animosity felt toward their political foes of New England and New York.

But the Englishman was a daring soldier only by necessity. He did not attract these children of nature by ruthless conquest nor by sympathetic condescension. Busy and reserved, he showed them little courtesy, which greatly wounded their pride and self-respect. He troubled himself little about them unless they intruded on him, when he was haughty and contemptuous; or when they committed injuries, which he punished with a severity that seemed to him just. The more the English settlements prospered, the higher the star of civilization rose, and the more industry, art, commercial and political liberty flourished, the less room was there for the wild and wasteful Indian hunter, the more helpless, dependent and degraded he became. He would not, as, indeed, he could not, accept civilization, and share in the hopes and prosperity which the New Age promised to the New World. The growing benevolence and pity of a people daily becoming more enlightened and just to their kind in general, could not be expressed to his comprehension, for the space required by an industrious population under the stimulus of an unexampled prosperity pushed him further and further from his ancient hunting grounds and the graves of his fathers, and his resentful retaliations made desolating punishments unavoidable. Thus the most enlightened and humane era of exploration— so far as the real character and purposes of the explorers were concerned became the most wasting and ruinous to the Indian tribes of the Valley. To this statement there were, after a time, and far into our own century, some exceptions, but none during early periods.

English interest in the Great Valley commenced just before

EARLY ENGLISH EXPLORATION IN THE VALLEY. 187

the close of the seventeenth century. As D'Iberville returned from his first exploration of the lower course of the Mississippi, in 1699, he found two English vessels near the mouth of the river. They had been sent by William III., king of England, to take possession of the Valley by fortifying the mouth of its principal stream. Finding themselves anticipated by the French, they withdrew. About 1690 the settlements of Virginia had extended their outposts to the foot of the Blue Ridge, and begun to pass over into the Shenandoah Valley, in the southern part of which are found the headwaters of various tributaries of the Ohio; and they soon became anxious to know what lay beyond. In 1710 Governor Spottswood, of Virginia, led a party across the watershed, and is said to have given their name to the Cumberland Mountains. Others refer the name to Dr. Thomas Walker, an explorer of 1747 or 1748. The Cherokees had been visited by an English trader in 1690, and in 1730 Adair, of South Carolina, visited them and some other tribes. In the same year John Salling, of the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, was captured by the Cherokees, and carried to their country; was captured again, while out with one of their hunting parties, by the Illinois tribe, liberated by the French, at Kaskaskia, and returned home, by way of Canada, after an absence of six years.

The publications of the French explorers, the above mentioned and other occasional glimpses of English adventurers and traders, and the accounts of the Indians inflamed the desire of the Anglo-American public to penetrate to these, evidently the best, lands of the continent. But the circumstances were long unfavorable. The French home government began to take an interest in the Mississippi Valley, and the Canadian authorities took more and more pains to cultivate the friendship and alliance of the Indian tribes about the lakes and the headwaters of the Ohio. As the French soldiers, trappers and traders were agreeable companions as