Flowering of the Cumberland

12. The Business World

269 CHAPTER 12 The Business World There was among the first and early settlers in the old West no man today remembered primarily because he amassed a large fortune or was a great businessman. Yet, most settlers on the Cumberland from Daniel Smith in the land business to Martha Turner advertising “18 or 20 barrels prime whiskey”1 for sale were in some kind of business. In preparation for this work around two hundred lives were gone into quite deeply. There were a good many published autobiographies and biographies; others wrote short life histories for Mr. Draper, and many more were well enough represented in source materials one could piece out the patterns of their lives. No one was a career man in the sense his whole life was bound up in the one thing. Practically all studied were landowners, usually farmers, but all were at one time or another store- or tavern-keeper, ferryman, land speculator , trader, hunter, and no fairly large farmer, in the process of changing crops into some salable commodity, could escape the ramifications of business . Many were active in political, governmental, and social life, though relatively few were prominent at State and Federal levels as was John Overton or James Winchester. Most served on juries, supervised road workings, laid out towns, planned schools, took part in military campaigns, and were active in some form of business. The effects of the first settlers are those of men who planned to buy and sell—scales, measures, steelyards, and business agreements were plentiful. Death and burial were conducted on a businesslike basis; Thomas McCain, for example, was buried in 1789 at a cost of ten pounds with the administrator getting the usual 2½ per cent.2 Even up the river where life was a good deal less sophisticated, the cost of whiskey required to sell his goods were,3 like the paling of the grave,4 charged against the dead man’s estate. Much has been written of pioneer openhandedness, but travelers seldom found it. The difficulties of James Smith and Jamie in the Yadkin Country 270| Chapter 12 of 1766, jailed on suspicion of character, are fairly typical of the fate of any poorly dressed stranger, unable to give a proper account of his situation.5 More than thirty years later Francis Baily in the rough dress of a workingman and mounted on a cheap pack horse, found no latchstrings out in the Cumberland Country. He stopped at several prosperous plantations, but he at last concluded, “the idea of their being hospitable and doing a kindness to strangers for nothing is false. This hospitality is only shown to neighbors and kin where they expect it will be repaid by the same return and arises from a want of inns on the road. . . .” His feelings were colored by the dollar he had had to pay a Tennessee farmer for one night’s keep for his two horses, and food for himself which had consisted of only “Indian bread, butter, and milk.”6 The Dukes of Orleans, coming the same year as Baily, found little between Southwest Point and Dixon’s Springs but bear meat and corn bread, and the fact of their being dukes neither increased the service nor lowered the rate. Bishop Asbury, one of the most highly esteemed ministers of his day, was almost always charged in taverns and quite often in private homes. John Sevier, the best-known and loved man in all the West, paid for his lodging when traveling except when he visited an old friend like James Robertson. During the Revolution such was the feeling against Tories, particularly in East Tennessee, that travelers in order to avoid suspicion carried letters known as Whig chits, attesting to their patriotism and signed by several prominent men of their neighborhoods. The Cumberlanders were more interested in character chits. In the spring of 1784 Davidson County Court deliberated and cogitated upon the papers brought by Mr. Jacob Shivley from “Sundry Gentlemen in the State of Virginia.” Happily for Mr. Shivley, the court decided that “nothing ought to operate against his character.”7 Years later up in Kentucky, Samuel Forrest removing from Mercer and Lincoln counties, brought before the court, sitting at Somerset, his character certificates to which nine signatures and one mark were affixed, all testifying to the fact the signers had known the bearer for seven years.8 Justices of the county court and other prominent men of any western neighborhood not only had to...