The Frontiersmen | Page 5

measure, and their swift flights from one stockade to another in those
sudden panics during the troubled period preceding the Cherokee War,
might have seemed more exciting material for romancing for a
venturesome Munchausen, but perhaps these realities were too stern to
afford any interest in the present or glamour in the past.
It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the
Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several
minor stations to the southeast. Although Blue Lick sustained the attack,
still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders, the settlers
retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered frontier beyond
Fort Prince George, living from hand to mouth, some at Long Cane and
some at Ninety-Six, through those years when first Montgomerie and
then Grant made their furious forays through the Cherokee country.
Emsden, having served in the provincial regiment, eagerly coveted a
commission, of which Richard Mivane had feigned to speak. Now that
the Cherokees were ostensibly pacified,--that is, exhausted, decimated,
their towns burned, their best and bravest slain, their hearts broken,--the
fugitives from this settlement on the Eupharsee River, as the Hiwassee

was then called, gathered their household gods and journeyed back to
Blue Lick, to cry out in the wilderness that they were "home" once
more, and clasp each other's hands in joyful gratulation to witness the
roofs and stockade rise again, rebuilt as of yore. Strangely enough,
there were old Cherokee friends to greet them anew and to be
welcomed into the stockade; for even the rigid rule of war and hate
must needs be proved by its exceptions. And there were one or two
pensive philosophers among the English settlers vaguely sad to see all
the Cherokee traditions and prestige, and remnants of prehistoric
pseudo-civilization, shattered in the dust, and the tremulous, foreign,
unaccustomed effort--half-hearted, half-believing,
half-understanding--to put on the habitude of a new civilization.
"The white man's religion permits poverty, but the Indian divides his
store with the needy, and there are none suffered to be poor," said
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the famous chief. "The white men wrangle and
quarrel together, even brother with brother; with us the inner tribal
peace is ever unbroken. The white men slay and rob and oppress the
poor, and with many cunning treaties take now our lands and now our
lives; then they offer us their religion;--why does it seem so like an
empty bowl?"
"Atta-Kulla-Kulla, you know that I am deaf," said Richard Mivane,
"and you ask me such hard questions that I am not able to hear them."
It is more than probable that these stationers in the vanguard of the
irrepressible march of western emigration had been trespassers, and
thus earned their misfortunes, in some sort, by their encroachment on
Indian territory; although since the war the Cherokee boundaries had
become more vague than heretofore, it being considered that Grant's
operations had extended the frontier by some seventy miles. It may be,
too, that the Blue Lick settlers held their own by right of private
purchase; for the inhibition to the acquisition of land in this way from
the Indians was not enacted till the following year, 1763, after the
events to be herein detailed, and, indeed, such purchases even further
west and of an earlier date are of record, albeit of doubtful legality.
Now that peace in whatever maimed sort had come to this stricken land
and these adventurous settlers, who held their lives, their all, by such
precarious tenure, internecine strife must needs arise among them; not
the hand of brother against brother,--they were spared that grief,--but

one tender, struggling community against another.
And it came about in this wise.
One day Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane, watching from the
"port-hole" of the blockhouse, where the muzzle of that dog of war the
little swivel gun had once been wont to look forth, beheld Ralph
Emsden ride out from the stockade gate for a week's absence with a
party of hunters; with bluff but tender assurance he waved his hat and
hand to her in farewell.
"Before all the men!" she said to herself, half in prudish dismay at his
effrontery, and yet pleased that he did not sheepishly seek to conceal
his preference. And although the men (there were but two or three and
not half the province, as her horror of this publicity would seem to
imply) said with a grin "Command me!" they said it sotto voce and only
to each other.
Spring was once more afoot in the land. They daily marked her advance
as they went. Halfway up the mountains she had climbed: for the
maples were blooming in rich dark reds that made the nearer slopes
even more splendid of garb than the velvet azure of the distant