ank in the Revolution; and
that militant man of God, the Reverend James Hall, graduate of
Nassau Hall, stalwart and manly, who carried a rifle on his
shoulder and, in the intervals between the slaughter of the
savages, preached the gospel to the vindictive and bloodthirsty
backwoodsmen. Such preaching was sorely needed on that campaign--when
the whites, maddened beyond the bounds of self-control by
the recent ghastly murders, gladly availed themselves of the
South Carolina bounty offered for fresh Indian scalps. At times
they exultantly displayed the reeking patches of hair above the
gates of their stockades; at others, with many a bloody oath,
they compelled their commanders either to sell the Indian
captives into slavery or else see them scalped on the spot.
Twenty years afterward Benjamin Hawkins relates that among Indian
refugees in extreme western Georgia the children had been so
terrorized by their parents' recitals of the atrocities of the
enraged borderers in the campaign of 1776, that they ran
screaming from the face of a white man.

CHAPTER XVII. The Colonization of the Cumberland

March 31, 1760. Set out this day, and after running some
distance, met with Col. Richard Henderson, who was running the
line between Virginia and North Carolina. At this meeting we were
much rejoiced. He gave us every information we wished, and
further informed us that he had purchased a quantity of corn in
Kentucky, to be shipped at the Falls of Ohio, for the use of the
Cumberland settlement. We are now without bread, and are
compelled to hunt the buffalo to preserve life.--John Donelson:
Journal of a Voyage, intended by God's permission, in the good
boat Adventure, from Fort Patrick Henry, on Holston River, to the
French Salt Springs on Cumberland River.

To the settlements in Tennessee and Kentucky, which they had
seized and occupied, the pioneers held on with a tenacious grip
which never relaxed. From these strongholds, won through sullen
and desperate strokes, they pushed deeper into the wilderness,
once again to meet with undimmed courage the bitter onslaughts of
their resentful foes. The crushing of the Cherokees in 1776
relieved the pressure upon the Tennessee settlers, enabling them
to strengthen their hold and prepare effectively for future
eventualities; the possession of the gateway to Kentucky kept
free the passage for Western settlement; Watauga and its
defenders continued to offer a formidable barrier to B