IX.

SARAH SHELBY.

Sarah, already mentioned as the eldest daughter of Mrs. Bledsoe, was born in the first year of the first settlement of Tennessee. She was very young when her family removed from Fort Chissel, Virginia, to East Tennessee. Their residence was then on the frontier, near the island flats, in what is now Sullivan County. Her early education was excellent, considering the circumstances of location and the want of the advantages of instruction which could be enjoyed in older communities. She attended the first and only lessons in dancing, given in 1784, not long before her marriage, at the house of Mr. Harris, twelve miles from Col. Bledsoe’s residence. The teacher was Capt. Barrett, an English officer who had served under the royal banner in the war of the Revolution, and then left the service, determined to cast his lot for the rest of his days with the brave republicans against whose liberties he had fought. It was among the singular vicissitudes of life, that a loyal captain who in all probability had served under Col. Ferguson at the battle of King’s Mountain, battling to the death against the Tennessee mountaineers, should be found afterwards in the wilderness giving lessons to their daughters in this graceful accomplishment! The gentleman who furnishes this memoir quaintly observes, that “not being able to make the fathers run, he was content with making the daughters dance.”

While the family still lived in Sullivan County, Miss Bledsoe was married, in 1784, to David Shelby. Soon after, the young couple, with Col. Bledsoe and his family, came and fixed their homes in the midst of the wilderness of the Cumberland Valley, which Bledsoe and his brother had explored in 1779. The journey by land at that time from East Tennessee was a difficult and perilous one, across mountains and through forests and canebrakes, where it was impossible to force a wagon. Every article carried had to be packed on horses.

The families who formed this pioneer settlement in the Cumberland Valley were not destitute of means to live comfortably in a region where the necessaries and comforts of life could be procured, but isolated as they were from all advantages of communication or interchange with the friends they had left, they were thrown entirely upon the resources of their own labor and ingenuity. Their dwellings were rude cabins made of logs, sometimes rough and sometimes hewn. For protection against the Indians a number of these cabins were surrounded by pickets bullet-proof, and several families, usually related to each other, or attached as old neighbors, lived within the fenced space. Sometimes the pioneers resided in the blockhouses, built in the salient points of these picketed enclosures. The upper story of these blockhouses projected over the lower one, with portholes in the floor, so that persons within might shoot an assailant who approached too near under cover of the projection. The term “station,” in the frontier vocabulary of those times, meant a blockhouse, picketed so as to shelter several families. It was usually called by the name of the builder or the owner of the land—as “Buchanan’s Station,” &c. Some, however, were known by more fanciful designations, as “Bledsoe’s Lick,” “French Lick,” etc.

It has been already stated that at the time of Col. Bledsoe’s exploration of the Cumberland Valley, no white man lived within the limits of Tennessee, west of the mountains, except a few French traders who had become naturalized among the Indians. After the removal of the family they suffered many hardships, which pressed most heavily upon the women, while shut up within military defences in the midst of the forest. No supplies of groceries or dry goods could be obtained in the valley, and all the clothing worn by the pioneers, male and female, was of home manufacture. Not one of the females was exempted from this labor; all learned how to spin and weave, and it was the pride and glory of these stout-hearted dames to prepare the material and make up with their own hands the clothes worn by themselves, their husbands and children. Col. Bledsoe was attired in a full suit manufactured by his wife and daughters, when he represented the Cumberland Valley in the Legislature of North Carolina.

All articles of consumption which could not be procured in the woods or raised on their plantations, were very scarce. Salt could only be obtained by tedious and dangerous journeys to the Kanawha salt works in Virginia, or to some French salt works in Illinois, then a part of Louisiana. Imported sugar, coffee and tea were almost excluded from use among the families in the valley, by the expense and difficulty of procuring them. For the first two or three years, before the dangers in the midst of which they lived, permitted them to cultivate the soil to any extent, even bread was scarcely to be had. The rifle of the pioneer procured for his family venison, bear’s meat and wild turkeys, as well as protected them from Indian marauders. A little sugar was made every spring from the maple trees, which grew in great abundance in the untrodden forest. For this purpose large parties of old and young, male and female, when they had fixed upon a convenient location, assembled and bivouacked, or “camped,” to use their own phrase, in the woods near the grove of maples, which were soon notched and pierced. The sap was caught in small troughs dug out with an axe, and carried to the camp, where it was boiled down in large pots. In two or three days thus spent, sugar enough was often produced to furnish a year’s supply for a family, and the occasion did not fail to afford opportunity for a rustic re-union for all the young people of the neighborhood.

Nothing was known at that time of the culture of cotton. Flax was grown, however, and the prettiest girls in the valley hatchelled, spun and wove it; the forest trees and shrubs yielding ample materials for dye-stuffs, by which a variety of colors might be furnished for ball or bridal costume for the fairest demoiselles of the new colony. A beautiful scarlet was produced from sassafras and sumach, and the walnut furnished a bright brown, of which color were dyed the jeans which formed full suits, elegant enough for the gentlemen’s holiday wearing. This material, made in old style, is still a favorite in all the rural districts of Tennessee, the process of its manufacture having been taught, as a hereditary art, by mother to daughter, from generation to generation.

If we may rely upon tradition, the women whose time was thus passed exclusively in useful occupations, and whose labors demanded continual exercise, were superior in personal beauty to their paler and more luxurious descendants. Be that as it may, their ideas of feminine accomplishment and female merit were certainly different from those of modern days. A young woman then prided herself, not on finery purchased with the labor of others, but on the number of hanks of thread she could spin, or yards she could weave in a day on a rustic loom, made, perhaps, by her father or brother. Many a maiden whose father could reckon his acres of land in the wilderness by thousands, has appeared at church or at a country assembly dressed from head to foot in articles manufactured entirely by herself, and looking as bright and lovely in her gay colors as the proudest city dame who could lay the looms of India under contribution.

Mrs. Shelby’s husband was the first merchant in Nashville, and perhaps in middle Tennessee. He established himself as such in 1790, and after two or three years, removed to Sumner County, where he was appointed to the office of clerk, the first chosen in the county. This office he continued to hold, residing in Gallatin, till his death in 1819. He maintained throughout life a high and honorable position among the settlers of the Valley, possessing qualities of mind and heart which would have commanded success and ensured usefulness in the most eminent station to which a republican could have aspired, in the new State which he and his family aided in building up. But he was not ambitious, and preferred retirement in the bosom of his family, and the unostentatious discharge of the duties of an humble office, husbanding the resources he possessed for the purpose of giving his children a substantial education, and fitting them for lives of usefulness.

Mrs. Shelby has frequently mentioned incidents that occurred on different occasions when she and her husband were compelled to fly from Indians, and narrowly escaped destruction. At one time the savages came to the block-house where she lived, and attempted to shoot through a crack in the chimney. It happened that Mrs. Shelby, feeling a presentiment of danger, had stopped the crevice on the inside by a plank, which the bullets could not penetrate without having their deadly force spent. The savages were around the house during the night, as was discovered by their tracks about the place, and the finding of several articles belonging to them, such as pipes, moccasins, etc.

The day after the death of Col. Anthony Bledsoe, Mrs. Shelby went with her husband, son and servants to Bledsoe’s Lick, to attend his funeral, although the distance was ten miles, and it was known the Indians were in the forest. The son, now Dr. Shelby, of Nashville, remembers that his father went in advance, armed with a rifle and holsters, his mother next, and that he followed with a negro, who also carried a rifle.

In 1788, while living on Station Camp Creek, in Sumner County, Mrs. Shelby was one day at home with only her little children. As usual in the early settlements, they lived in a log cabin, in which open places between the logs served the place of windows. Her husband was in the fields, some distance from the house. While seated by the fire she was startled by the appearance of an Indian warrior, fully armed, approaching her cabin. Quick as thought, she took down a loaded rifle that hung on the wall, and whispered to her son, then only six years old, to go out by the back door, and run into the field for his father, which he did quietly, but with all speed. Then placing herself near the door, she put the muzzle of the rifle through a crack in the wall, and stood, with her finger on the trigger, ready to shoot the Indian as he came near, approaching the door. Just at the moment when Mrs. Shelby was about to shoot, with deadly aim, the savage saw the gun, and with hasty strides retreated to the woods. Thus the heroism of the matron saved not only her own life, but the lives of several small children. Soon after the retreat of the Indian, Mr. Shelby and his son reached the house, to embrace the heroic wife and mother, who still stood with the rifle in her hands.

The history of Mrs. Shelby and her family, if properly given, would embrace almost the entire history of Tennessee; nor would it be possible to offer anything like an adequate sketch of the founders of the colony of Cumberland Valley, without writing in detail the history of that eventful period. This may be done by some future historian, the scope of whose work will permit him to do full justice to the patient and self-denying toil, and the heroic deeds of those enterprising pioneers. Whenever this is done, the names of Bledsoe, Shelby, Sevier, Robertson, Buchanan, Rains, and Wilson, cannot fail to shine forth prominently in the picture. These men were neither refugees from justice, nor outlaws from civilization, but belonged to a band of patriots who came, like Hooker, Haynes, or Roger Williams, to set up the altar of freedom, and find a home in primeval forests, beyond the reach of oppression, where they might live independently, and in time happily. They came not, as they knew, to an ideal paradise, or happy valley, but to a dreary wilderness, where a thousand perils environed them; beyond the paternal care of either state or federal government; harassed from time to time by a savage foe; destitute of regular supplies of provisions or munitions of war; depending for subsistence on the forest and the small patches of cornfield they were able to cultivate in the intervals of Indian campaigns; a mere handful of men, with a few helpless women and children, and equally dependent slaves; yet they kept their ground, and year by year increased in numbers and strength, till after a struggle of fifteen years against fearful odds of Indian enemies, the colony numbered from seven to eight thousand! During all this time of trial, the armed occupation was maintained with toil and bloodshed, both of men and women, who showed, in times of emergency, that they, too, possessed the lion will and the lion heart. Thrilling was the story of their adventures, with which, in after years, they held their listeners spell-bound; and far surpassing the wildest romance were their homely but interesting narratives, glowing in the warm coloring of life. They told

Among the women of this period, remembered particularly for the energy and cheerful self-denial with which they aided the hardy pioneers, encouraging and animating them, while sharing in their labors, none did her part more nobly, with more womanly grace as well as firmness and resolution, than Mrs. Shelby. Her memory preserved to an advanced age every prominent incident connected with the settlement of East Tennessee and of the Cumberland Valley. Every part of the State, within her recollection, was a wilderness. Having lived through the border troubles and succeeding years of change, having survived the slaughter of her nearest relatives by the murderous Cherokees and marauding Creeks and Shawanese, she lived to see that helpless and bleeding colony of the Watauga, increase and multiply and grow up in the midst of the receding forest to a goodly State—it may be said, a nation.

This venerable matron died on the 11th of March, 1852, in the eighty-sixth year of her age. She was in her usual health, and occupied with her needle, only three days before her death. She had long been a member of the Episcopal church, and gave up her spirit to God with Christian resignation, leaving an affectionate circle of her children and descendants to mourn her departure.

She had been in the habit of going to visit her relatives in the old county where she formerly resided. The fourth of July, 1851, was kept by a number of aged pioneers in Sumner, assembled to dine together, and many were the interesting recollections called up on that occasion.

After 1832, Mrs. Shelby’s residence was with her son, Dr. Shelby at his beautiful country-seat, “Faderland,” in the vicinity of Nashville, now almost surrounded by the new town of Edgefield. It was a pleasure to her to receive and converse with all interested in the early history of Tennessee, and she presented in her own bearing and character a noble example of the heroines of those times of trial. The laborious, painful, and perilous experiences of her life withal, never marred the harmony of her nature; and in advanced age she had the contented and cheerful spirit of one whose days have glided away in undisturbed tranquillity. She was a deeply spiritual Christian, engaged continually, as far as her strength permitted, in the dispensation of charities, and exhibiting to those who knew her, the beauty of an humble and earnest “walk by faith.”

Her husband, David Shelby, died in 1822, leaving several children, who were reared to sustain their part with usefulness in the arena of life, and in the midst of difficulties to exhibit the same energy and patience which had distinguished their parents. Judge Shelby, of Texas, was one of these children. John, the eldest son, was the first white child born in Sumner County, and is one of the oldest and worthiest citizens of Nashville. He determined in youth to study medicine, and was sent to Philadelphia to have the advantage of instruction under the celebrated Dr. Rush. He settled early in Nashville, where for many years he devoted himself successfully to the practice of his profession, being also occupied in the management of a large private business, in taking care of his town property. In 1813, he was a volunteer under Jackson, in the Creek war, and received a wound in the eye in the battle of Enotochopco. Though holding the office of surgeon in the army, he took an active part in rallying and leading the troops in this memorable action, and in acknowledgement of his services was honorably mentioned by the General.

He is now sixty-seven years of age, and after an arduous and well spent life, is still able to perform the duties of a responsible office, and to manage the business of a large farm. One of his daughters is the wife of the Hon. George Washington Barrow, late representative in Congress for the Nashville District, and during the years 1841-5, Chargé d’Affaires to the court of Portugal. Another daughter is Mrs. Priscilla Williams, now residing at Memphis, Tennessee.