Flowering of the Cumberland

2. The Underpinning

25 CHAPTER 2 The Underpinning Sally Buchanan’s first-born came eleven days after the Siege of Buchanan’s, and it was followed through the years by eight brothers and four sisters.1 The Buchanan family was larger than most, but there was nothing unusual about the mother’s activities during an Indian battle. There are from all borders many stories of female courage. Reverend Joseph Doddridge , remembering the preparations for an Indian attack on the western Virginia fort where he had lived as a boy, declared, “I do not know that I ever saw a merrier set of women in my life.”2 These women as they brought in a store of spring water, run bullets, and cut patching had shown no more fear than had Sally Buchanan. The Cumberland settlements, never with any proper fort or paid soldiers ,3 knew Indian raids almost weekly for fifteen years, and there are thus a great many stories of brave women. Mrs. Bell loaded for her husband with the “shot pouch on her neck and two or three bullets in her mouth,”4 and dozens of women at one time or another “run a hundred bullets,” as did Mrs. Hickman.5 The border moving south and west multiplied the stories. One of the most vivid memories of Admiral Farragut, not born until 1801, was that of his mother slamming the door, but unable to close it because the Indian on the other side had shoved the barrel of his rifle through, and so “she held a parley,” with him at the door.6 The Farragut home, even at that late date, though only a dozen miles or so south of Knoxville, was still close to Indian territory. Dramatic as these acts were, they were only a small part in the long struggle of most women on the frontier to deal with all the complexities of life on a forted farm and at the same time bring up children as educated, civilized human beings. Around two-thirds of the wives of the original settlers were widowed before the ending of the Indian Wars in Middle Tennessee 26| Chapter 2 in 1795. Numerous others, settling later—Mesdames Anthony and Isaac Bledsoe, Edwin Hickman, Jacob Castleman, John Donelson, Sr., Henry Rutherford, William Ramsey, to name only a few, were also widowed.7 Few seem either to have remarried or to have returned to kin and parents in the safer East. Leah Lucas, widowed in 1781, was not exceptional in staying, going in time to her husband’s land, bringing up five children8 and educating them as well. Her lot was easy compared to that of Mrs. Jane Brown, whose husband, Colonel James Brown, as a soldier of the North Carolina line received a boundary of land on the Cumberland. In 1788 the Browns started down the Tennessee—the Colonel, Mrs. Brown, five sons, four daughters, and three sons-in-law. The Indians attacked and killed all except Mrs. Brown and the two younger sons and three daughters. Captured,9 all were separated, and the widow lived for some months not knowing what members of her family had survived. Freed at last through the intercession of Alexander McGillivray , Jane Brown with three of her children—one had died—continued on to the family land on the Cumberland, where with the help of her son Joseph, survivor of around three years of Indian captivity, she made a home for her family, meanwhile writing letters to McGillivray, petitioning Governor Blount, questioning traders in regard to the whereabouts and possible release of one still-captive son. The woman of the old Southwest had to learn to manage without a man, for even when the head of the house was alive he was often gone from home. James Robertson, for example, must have spent at least half of the first thirty years of his married life away from home on the many long trips made in connection with business and politics. Daniel Smith and the Bledsoes, like the rest of the party who in 1779–1780 surveyed the North CarolinaVirginia line, were gone from their families more than a year.10 Even a flatboat trip to New Orleans such as General James Winchester11 made in 1789 with several of his neighbors could mean a six months’ separation . Mrs. Thimote De Monbruen, living in Nashville during the siege of Buchanan’s, had been much alone for her husband as hunter—trader had made, beginning in the early sixties, many long...