Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1853)

60

ASSOCIATIONS CONNECTED WITH LOUDON.

Jack, Stuart and Thomas, who were saved by the friendly exertions of the Indian chief called the Little Carpenter; except also, six men, who were in the advance guard, and who escaped into the white settlements.”  *  *  *  “It is said that between two and three hundred men, besides  women and children, perished in this massacre. The Indians made a fence of their bones, but after the war they were, by advice of Oconostota, King of the Over-hill Cherokees, removed and buried, for fear of stirring afresh the hostility of English traders, who began again to visit them.” Such, too, has been the prevalent tradition.

In addition to the concealment within the fort of the ammunition, as already related, Haywood mentions that the garrison threw their cannon, with their small arms and ammunition, into the river. After the close of the war the Cherokees excused their perfidy in violating the terms of the capitulation, and their barbarous massacre of the garrison, by imputing bad faith on the part of the white in hiding the warlike stores surrendered with the fort.

Associations connected with Loudon as the first English fort erected within the State of Tennessee, the mournful fate of its garrison, and the tragic issue of the earliest Anglo-American settlement planted upon our soil, have invested the history of Old Fort Loudon with a romantic and melancholy interest—one that may be deemed elsewhere disproportioned to its real importance. But the writer persuades himself that the tediousness of the preceding details—scarcely in consonance with the object of these annals—will be excused, when it is considered, that hereafter no opportunity will present itself of again recording the surrender of a fort or the capture and massacre of a garrison. In the narration of the events upon which he will soon enter, it will be the grateful duty of the annalist to show, that in all their border conflicts, in their wild adventures into the wilderness, in their frequent invasions of neighbouring tribes, in their glorious participation in the struggle for independence  and freedom, in all their wars with European or American enemies, the sons of Tennessee have every where achieved success, triumph, victory, conquest and glory.