Читать книгу Atlanta And Its Builders, Vol. 1 - A Comprehensive History Of The Gate City Of The South - Thomas H. Martin - Страница 6

To understand the spirit characteristic of Atlanta since her foundation — the spirit of pluck and push — one must take into consideration the peculiar character of the pioneers who made the country that made Atlanta. In doing so one cannot but be struck by the analogy of her history with that of the average Western town. While it is true that the portion of DeKalb county which included Atlanta the first few years of her history was outside the disputed Cherokee territory, it was but a few miles from the Indian border — so close that some of the land in the vicinity of the then unborn town was clouded by Cherokee claims. When Georgia finally obtained possession of the great reservation, a considerable portion of it was added to DeKalb county. The rest was added to Carroll, Gwinnett, Hall and Habersham counties. Georgia, it will be borne in mind, was a comparatively old state at the time of the Cherokee emigration. Its desirable public lands were long since taken by settlers, and many of her hardy sons had joined the constantly growing army of pioneers seeking homes on the rich prairies a few hundred miles west. In those days it was a common expression among the restless landless class that "A poor man has no chance in Georgia." The arable lands of the commonwealth were largely in the hands of large landlords who cultivated them by means of slave labor, and the poor white who could not obtain a foothold in the Piedmont hill country and clear a farm from the forest, naturally drifted west. For years before the opening of the Cherokee reservation was accomplished, the eyes of thousands of worthy men with little capital but the will and muscle to do, were turned toward the forbidden land, hoping to ere long be able to find homes there.

Since these men largely laid the foundation of Atlanta's prosperity, it is well to know something about them in this connection. Few of them could boast of aristocratic forebears who received handsome land patents from their English sovereign, or who were members of exclusive colonial society. They sprang from the stock that made possible the patriot victory at King's Mountain — the shaggy wearers of homespun and coonskin caps whose long-barreled rifles made the Hessian dearly earn his hire. Davy Crockett will stand as a representative type of the "backwoodsmen" who cleared the farms of the great Appalachian region, and it was from such ancestors that the settlers of north Georgia came. These indomitable home-makers were for the most part of the matchless strain known as Scotch-Irish, possessing those rugged traits of independence, industriousness and honesty that Burns extols in his verse. Probably the descendants of these pioneers represent today the most distinctive type of American. They have preserved their native blood against the hybridizing effect of foreign immigration, so manifest in all other sections of the country, and their Americanism is as unadulterated.

Speaking of this important element of citizens, the "The Commonwealth of Georgia" thus describes the North Georgians: "The population of Northeast Georgia is largely made up of immigrants and their descendants from the mountain regions of the states lying eastward. These, in their turn, had an unusual sprinkling of Scotch blood, due to another natural law that impels emigrants from an older country to seek the counterpart of their own familiar mountains, dales or plains, as the case may be, in the El Dorado of their future. The rough, hardy Scotch, inured to hardship, accustomed to their cold mountain springs, and their clear streams of water, upon landing on the coast regions of the Old Dominion and the Old North State, would naturally seek the Piedmont region. From thence, along the valleys, they have crossed over into Georgia, still finding a congenial home and a thousand reminders of bonny Scotland. Thus the people of Northeast Georgia are largely of Scotch descent, as is otherwise indicated by the prevalence of the prefix, 'Mac' Northwest Georgia has received considerable accessions of population, by way of reflex, from East Tennessee, whose rich valleys extend into the northwestern counties of Georgia. Many of these were also of Scotch descent. The seacoast counties, on the other hand, received their principal accessions of population from a class who were blessed with mere wealth and corresponding culture — a class more strongly wedded to the traditions of England and France."

There is a good deal of romance associated with the settlement of North Georgia. A history of the period of Cherokee troubles, picturesquely treated, would read very much like a Pike's Peak rush or the Leadville excitement. As has been stated, the existence of gold in paying quantity in several of the counties afterwards formed from the Cherokee nation, had much to do with the coveting of the country by the white man, and was the source of much trouble and no little expense to the state of Georgia. A large adventurer class was attracted to the Georgia mountains while the Indians still retained possession of the country, and crudely mined in the region between the Chestatee and Etowah rivers. Their operations were carried on mainly by the placer process, and, from Governor Gilmer's account, they must have been a lawless lot. They numbered some ten thousand, gathered from the four quarters. Many of them had, or pretended to have, the permission of the Indians to search for gold. The state regarded their presence with extreme displeasure and sent several military expeditions against them to drive them off the reservation. In a communication to the attorney-general of the United States, Governor Gilmer said: ''The state considers itself entitled to all the valuable minerals within the soil of the Cherokee territory, by virtue of its fee simple ownership, and is now permitting itself to be plundered of its wealth from the strong desire of its authorities to avoid any collision with the general government."

Speaking of the motley crew rendezvousing in the mountain fastnesses of north Georgia, the governor continues: "When this letter was written to the attorney-general, a community was forming in the gold regions scarcely ever paralleled anywhere. Many thousands of idle, profligate people flocked into the country from every point of the compass, whose pent-up vicious propensities, when loosed from the restraints of law and public opinion, made them like the evil one, in his worst mood. After wading all day in the creeks which made the Etowah and Chattahoochee rivers, picking up particles of gold, they collected around lightwood knot fires at night and played on the ground and their hats at cards, dice, push pin, and other games of chance, for their day's finding. Numerous whiskey carts supplied the appropriate aliment for their employments. Hundreds of combatants were sometimes seen at fisticuffs, striking and gouging, as frontiersmen only can do these things."

After much importunity on the part of the state of Georgia, the federal authorities took action and drove the gold-hunters out with several companies of infantry, but no sooner were they gone than the Cherokees took possession of the "diggings," mostly through their adopted white citizens, and continued to extract large quantities of gold. The federal troops did not interfere, and indignation among the white people along the border was at a high pitch. Governor Gilmer again wrote the attorney-general, saying: "Very great excitement is said to be the result. There is much reason to apprehend that the Indians will be forcibly driven from the gold region, unless they are immediately prohibited from appropriating its mineral wealth."

The state militia was shortly afterward ordered to the reservation to drive the Indians away from the gold streams, and it was during the first of these expeditions that Col. Harden, in command of the Hall county militia, was put under arrest by the federal commander in the reservation. Time and again the white boomers came back and were driven out. Several times there threatened to be an armed collision between the reckless miners and the military, and there was one riotous encounter that was dignified by the wags of the day by being called the "Battle of Leathersford." The militia had made a number of arrests, when it was set upon by a mob of boomers, who made desperate efforts to release the prisoners. Some heads were cracked with musket butts before the mob was driven off.

It is said that fully twenty thousand men, some of whom were accompanied by their families, had gathered around the Cherokee Nation in regular Oklahoma fashion, to await the departure of the aboriginal occupants. On the northern border the mountaineers of Tennessee and North Carolina were largely in evidence, and the canvas-topped wagons of the Piedmont Georgians clotted the southern border. It was a weary waiting, some of the intending settlers suffering severely for the necessities of life. Some of them lived in camps for seven or eight years before they were allowed to offer their names in the lottery that determined who should go in and enjoy the promised land. The Cherokee craze extended over the whole north half of Georgia and the adjacent region of neighboring states. The popular songs of the time referred to the common hope of obtaining Indian land. There was one, a couplet of which ran:

"I'm goin' for to leave my poor relation

And get me a home in the Cherokee Nation."

Such conditions as have been briefly described may with more degree of truth than appears on the surface be said to have given birth to Atlanta. Not that Atlanta came up like a mushroom, as a supply point for the Indian country or the receptacle of its overflow. It was several years after the Cherokees had removed to their new home before the little hamlet in the woods, destined to be the metropolis and capital of Georgia, contained a dozen shanties. But the opening of the Cherokee Nation had much to do with railroad building in northwest Georgia, and Atlanta was essentially the creation of the railroads. Two years before the Cherokees left, railroad conventions met in Knoxville, Tenn., and Macon, Ga., to project the construction of a railroad between the Chattahoochee and Tennessee rivers, and in the same year the legislature of Georgia passed a bill to build the State road as a main trunk between those important rivers, passing through the Cherokee territory. One of the strong points urged by the state before congress was the impediment of the Cherokee Nation to material progress. The great valley of Tennessee, unable to find an eastern outlet to the seaboard, because of the insuperable barrier interposed by the lofty Appalachian range, was anxious for railroad connection with Georgia to that end. When the Indians departed from Georgia, the bars were thrown down. There was no room for a large town northwest of the center of the state prior to that important event. There were no local resources to invite the railroads, and nothing to invite the people. Once the impediment was removed, the change was almost instantaneous. Less than a year after the federal government had given the Cherokees but two years longer to remain, the chief engineer of the railroad that was to be the connecting link between the Tennessee and Chattahoochee had run the preliminary survey and settled upon the site of Atlanta as a junction point.

At this period, the few settlers along the southern outskirts of the Cherokee reservation carried on a wagon trade with Augusta. The haul was a very long one, over wretched roads, and the round-trip generally consumed more than a fortnight. What little cotton and corn was raised was exchanged by the few merchants for dry goods and groceries of the most staple kind. There were very few families in the entire region that could afford luxuries. The houses were, almost without exception, built of logs, and many of them had dirt floors. Plenty of these rugged settlers had never seen wheat flour. Their commercial wants were exceedingly few. as they "lived at home" in the strictest meaning of the expression. Their boasted independence in this respect was purchased at the expense of great physical effort and discomfort, to say nothing of the waste of time. And yet, from what our surviving pioneer citizens and the printed chronicles of that well-nigh forgotten time tell us, the people were happy and contented in their impoverished isolation. They were hospitable to the few strangers who happened along, and the wayfaring man was never turned away from their humble doors. Among themselves they were highly sociable, often walking long distances to "preaching," dances, "log-raisings" and the other primitive amusements peculiar to remote communities. Life among the mountaineers of North Georgia was wilder then than now. and such exciting sports as bear righting, sometimes witnessed by the whole population of a township, were common. "White's Statistics of Georgia," in describing these counties back in the forties, says of one of them (Hall): "Hunting and rifle shooting occupy a Large part of the time of the people, who are generally temperate and hospitable, but rather shy of strangers." Of the people of Murray county, the same work says: "The amusements are dancing, racing, cock-fighting, gander-pulling and bear fights." Still, for all the roughness of their environment and the crudeness of their manner of living, these mountain-folk were law-abiding and peaceably inclined. Homicides were rare among them, as the court records of their counties will show, and they seem, by the same testimony, to have had little use for lawyers. It may sound strange, writing at this clay, to class the early inhabitants of the region immediately tributary to Atlanta, with the quaint mountaineers still presenting a picturesque type in the highland counties, but at that time DeKalb, and the other foothill counties, presented the same sociological conditions. The cultured and easy-living people of the low country regarded them as "yahoos," to use an expressive provincialism, and their fighting proclivities, as in the case of the westerner today, were exaggerated. It was the coming of the railroads that wrought the change.

Before concluding these cursory observations on the descent and characteristics of the first settlers of the wide section of Georgia that gave to the Southeast its chief city, it is well to refer to the fact that the so-called "cavalier" stock had little to do with laying the foundation of the new empire. The planter with his semi-feudal ideas and mode of life, descended from the old-line families of Virginia, was to be found further down in the state. Prosperous in his landed possessions, he had no motive to impel him to hew out a home in the wilderness to the north. "The Commonwealth of Georgia" says, apropos: "Middle Georgia, especially, is Virginian in modes of life, speech and manners. In common with her sister states of the old South, the ruling class have been the wealthy slave-owners and others in full sympathy with them." The historian could not have said this of North Georgia. Few slaves were owned in the entire region. True, the people were too poor to be slave-owners, and they had, in those times, no need for this kind of labor; but it must also be taken into consideration that they were not of slave-holding stock. A large proportion of them were of identically the same strain as the Puritans. Indeed, hundreds of them were not even born in the South. Of these some were immigrants from the old world and some from New England and Middle states. Scotchmen as straight-laced as any disciples of John Knox on their native heath, and Irishmen of strong "Orange" prejudices, were vital factors in the building of North Georgia. Wallace Putnam Reed, in his excellent history of Atlanta, notes this fact as follows: "It should be stated, however, that the state has received two noteworthy streams of immigration, one from Pennsylvania and one from New England. These immigrants at once mingled with the great mass of our people, and their descendants became typical Georgians." To one interested in genealogy, a study of the biographies of the prominent early residents of this section affords abundant proof of this singular fact. Many of the streets of Atlanta named for respected and valuable pioneer citizens, bear the names of men born in New England or elsewhere in the North. This is true of such prominent pioneers as Jonathan Norcross, William Markham, Richard Peters, Edward E. Rawson, Frank P. Rice, Sidney Root, H. I. Kimball, L. P. Grant, and others that might be named. Others Southern born came of the sturdy Scotch or Irish stock that had so much to do with the development of Piedmont Georgia. They were not of cavalier antecedents.