Massacre at Cavett's Station: Frontier Tennessee during the Cherokee Wars

Chapter 1. The Omen

Chapter 1 The Omen There is an old Southern Appalachian superstition that forewarns if a rooster stands in the doorway and crows, a death will occur in the family (O’dell 1944). The location at which the rooster crowed at daybreak on September 25, 1793, at the cabin of Alexander Cavett will never be known, but it served as an alarm clock for his family living at the head of Sinking Creek in what is now West Knox County, Tennessee. Having no more than two rooms and perhaps a sleeping loft, the log cabin sheltered 13 persons: three adult men and ten women and children. Under normal circumstances, crowded cabins were common in frontier Tennessee, but this morning several people were present who had taken refuge at what was called Cavett’s Station, a fortified farmstead, because word had spread that a large Indian war party was on the prowl. Two of the men there that day were members of the Sullivan County, Tennessee, militia, who had been sent to the station to help protect it. Used to such warnings, the Cavetts and their guests were nevertheless starting a typical day—the women preparing to milk the cows and stoking the embers in the fireplace to bake corn pone for breakfast, excited children running to and fro as they are want to do upon awakening, and the men quietly loading their flint lock rifles in preparation for a possible attack. Others also heard the crowing rooster and saw the fireplace smoke curling above the trees that fateful morning. On a ridge above the station, a war party of Cherokee and Creek Indians, perhaps 1,000 strong, had halted their surprise attack on the settlement of Knoxville eight miles away, believing they had been discovered when they heard the town’s reveille cannon. Angry because their original prize slipped from their grasp, they decided to attack the little cabin nestled in the valley below them. The Cavetts soon realized that the Indians were coming and were ready when the warriors, painted black and red in war colors, came whooping out of 2 The Omen the woods. In their first charge, the three adult men and perhaps some of the older boys laid down a curtain of fire from the gun ports in the log walls. A Creek and a Cherokee were killed, and the withering fire wounded three other warriors. The cabin filled with black powder smoke and the acrid smell of hot gun barrels. Children cried softly in the semi-darkness while men shouted orders and the women offered encouragement and helped to load the rifles. Stunned by the ferocity of the defenders, the Indians backed off a safe distance to ponder their next move. Then out of the blue haze from the gunfire, a strange redheaded man appeared, resembling a European yet dressed and painted like an Indian. He approached the cabin with a flag of truce. In perfect English, he informed the besieged that their situation was hopeless, but if they surrendered their lives would be spared and they would be exchanged for Indian prisoners. A life or death decision had to be made. Perhaps trusting the word of this English speaking warrior and knowing that the Indians often took women and children captive, the 13 settlers came out to meet an uncertain fate. Unfortunately, one of the head warriors, seething with rage because his brother had been recently killed by whites, murdered the unarmed Cavett party as they emerged from their small fort, except for a five-year-old boy who was taken captive but later killed in an Indian village. The station was plundered, burned to the ground, and the stock killed. The massacre at Cavett’s Station has been recorded in local history as one of the great tragedies on the eighteenth-century East Tennessee frontier during the time known as the Chickamauga War or Second Cherokee War. The First Cherokee War, ca. 1761–1775, was fought against the British after an initial yet strained alliance formed between the British and the Cherokee to combat the Yamasee Indians then dissolved when conflicts over land rights escalated. After division within the Overhill Cherokee resulted in Dragging Canoe leading a band of what were now known as the Chickamauga Cherokee into southeastern Tennessee and northern Georgia in 1777, they continued raiding and campaigning against American settler incursion into Indian territory until 1794. These conflicts , encompassing the massacre at Cavett’s Station, are collectively known as the Cherokee...