In 1748, in "ye Back Country" of Pennsylvania, Irishman James McCullough supplemented his farming in the Great Valley of the Appalachians by throwing the shuttle to provide his neighbors on Conococheague Creek with all types of linen, woolen, and cotton cloth. From 1750 to 1758 McCullough's journal shows that he turned out "chaker," "hickrey," and white "shirtin;" "stript" linsey for breeches; "bagin" and "tow clouth" to make sacks; and "girthin" for horse blankets. When he concealed his loom shafts, "wolling reed," "puley Stocks," and "other youtencels" in hollow trees during Indian alarms, he was protecting not only the means of his livelihood, but a community resource.
For those who didn't have looms or lived beyond the reach of McCullough's services, or who couldn't afford them, there was always buckskin, used for breeches by nearly everyone in colonial times, and for a lot more by the settlers of New Sweden who in the mid seventeenth century were left in the wilderness to fend for themselves by a neglectful homeland. The Delaware Indians called the Finns "akoores" or "nittappi" (those who are like us). And from the Indians Finns and Swedes alike learned to work skins into material they used to make men's "waistcoats and breeches" and women's "jackets and petticoats."
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries English and Irish settlers who married Anglicized Finns and Swedes in the Delaware basin passed along experience with buckskin tailoring to their children who took the knowledge into the Great Valley of the Appalachians. But skills varied. Some leather breeches were no doubt carefully fashioned by experienced hands. Others that were hastily stitched together must have been no better than the pair worn in 1785 by Kentucky surveyor Michael Bedinger, who was born in 1756 on Conewago Creek in York County, Pa. and raised after 1762 near Shepherdstown in the Great Valley. "Instead of the seams being stitched regularly, [Bedinger's breeches] were tied with leather strings from a half to and inch and a half apart with the knots outside, and the ends sometimes dangling down." The "tyings" opposite the knee and hip joints were "pretty close together, while along the thigh and below the knee" they were wider apart because they were less important. Strings, he said, "supplied the place of buttons."
Edward Swanson, a descendant of the Scandinavians, told historian John Haywood that near Nashville in the 1780s the male half of the population whose parents and grandparents had entered America through Delaware ports, wore "dressed deer Skins entirely for over Clothes" to protect shirts, jackets, and breeches. "Long leggings, and Hunting Shirts of dressed deer Skins, and cloth breach cloths were very common," he said. "Some wore bear Skins caps," although felt hats "were frequently made of Buffaloe wool." For shoes they "commonly wore deer Skins mocasins." Old Nashville pioneers painted a similar picture for A.W. Putnam, telling him how they dressed skins with brains to make them "pliable" and "velvety," turning them into "vests, pants, and even shirts, to be worn next to the person, as well as ... 'hunting-shirts,' as outside covering." "Buffalo-skin" moccasins were best for hunting in the woods, they said. Hugh F. Bell explained to Lyman Draper that "buffalo hide [with] the hair side turned in ... would not easily saturate;" but he said hunters would rather wear deerskin moccasins in camp.
In 1775 the earliest settlers of Kentucky, who packed all their possessions across the mountains on horses, hadn't the necessary machinery to make cloth. Cabins were small; looms were large and required specialized skills to build. Necessity forced settlers to use awls and long leather "whangs" to stitch elk and deer skins into clothing. But once the home weavers had set up their looms, dressed hides soon gave way to cloth of "their own make." People could now take the thread they spun from wild fibers to neighbors who exchanged skill with the shuttle for meat and hides. Olive Boone, Daniel's daughter-in-law, told Lyman Draper that settlers gathered "nettles ... toward spring [and spun] them." And William Clinkenbeard told John D. Shane they killed yearling buffalo just to collect their long, springtime wool, even to make felt for hats. "They did waste them then, at a mighty rate," he recalled. According to Olive Boone, the combination of a nettle warp and buffalo wool filling "was very strong," and socks "made of Buffalo wool alone" were "quite soft and wear very well."
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| Packs of timber wolves once played havoc with settlers' livestock from Appalachia to the Mississippi, but are now only rarely found in states bordering Canada. Smaller red wolves still inhabit the swamps of Arkansas, Louisiana, and eastern Texas, and face extinction not only from encroaching civilization but from inter-breeding with coyotes. |
At the same time in the Great Valley of the Appalachians, thickening settlement had long since pushed panthers and wolves to the high ridges, making the poisonous leaves of rhododendron and mountain laurel a sheep's worst enemies, and making linsey-woolsey standard material. By the 1760s buckskin was no longer a necessity; and only poor folk needed to wear homespun. Families with money could buy ready-made fabric from traders like Alexander Boyd, who hauled a variety textiles to his store in New London, Va. and across the Blue Ridge to Fort Lewis near the headwaters of Roanoke. People who in 1750 made do with dressed deerskin could—if they had the means—buy osnaburg, calico, flannel, Irish linen, and silk among other things.
On the Pennsylvania frontier in 1775 Philip Fithian found ladies in Buffalo Valley (Lewisburgh, Pa.) dressed in "the greatest Number & the greatest Variety of Silk Gowns ... that I have yet seen." And in Kishacoquillas Valley near Reedsville were "several Men" he said "made as an important a Figure as I could wish to see in Town." In the same year a hunter in Virginia's New River valley could exchange his buckskins and venison hams at James McCorkle's Dunkard Bottom store for cloth to make "leggons," but also for broadcloth, shoe buckles, jacket buttons, or a raccoon hat, which wasn't a coonskin with a tail in back, but a broad felt hat made of coon fur that a hatter sheared off and mixed "with a sticky preparation [to] spread over a form or hat block ..."
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| A plain linen shirt without ruffles, made to slip on over head. |
Styles of clothing, more than types of material, revealed essential differences between the cultures of the back country and the coast. In the southern colonies, for instance, Presbyterians and Lutherans, Quakers and Mennonites who filtered into the mountains and foothills from Pennsylvania, showed by their plain dress that they observed principles of humility in contrast to worldly high church folk. Some differed only slightly, wearing round hats instead of three-cornered hats. Others more austere used hooks and eyes instead of buttons, and leather strings instead of shoe and knee buckles. And since dissenters of one stripe or another set the tone for life in backwoods, sober attire became a regional as well as a religious symbol, a sign that they held not only the moral but the geographical high ground against tidewater Episcopalians in their lace finery. According to John Hedge, who came to Kentucky from the Monongahela River in 1789, people adhered so rigidly to the way they dressed "you could tell where a man was from, on first seeing him."
In the late 1760s Charles Woodmason, an Episcopal Minister assigned to Pine Tree Hill (later Camden) South Carolina, had much to say about Quakers and other "sectaries" from Pennsylvania who invaded his up-country parish. Quakers he called "a vile, licentious Pack ... Absolute Deists unfit [for the] Title of Christians." But Woodmason saved his choicest venom for the Presbyterian Irish who had settled "this Part of the Province ... within these 5 Years ... from Belfast, or Pensylvania." They were the "lowest vilest Crew breathing ... the worst Vermin on Earth ... mean, worthless, beggarly ... the Refuse of Mankind," who lived "wholly on Butter, Milk, Clabber and what in England is given to Hogs and Dogs." Their children, he said, "run wild here like the Indians."
The contest for souls between Baptists, New Lights, Presbyterians, Independents, and Episcopalians ("Damned Black Gown Sons of Bitches") only succeeded in making the unchurched "so pleas'd with their native ignorance, as to be offended at any attempts to rouse them out of it." Most horrifying to Woodmason was that these free thinkers lived in "Logg Cabbins" unchinked, "unfloored and almost open to the Sky," and slept "altogether ... in one Room [where they] shift and dress openly." They had naught to drink from but gourds, "Not a Plate Knive or Spoon, a Glass, Cup, or any thing—It is well if they can get some Body Linen, and some have not even that ... And many live by Hunting, and killing of Deer."
Woodmason found "some few well-dispos'd Religious Persons ... whose Knowledge," he added, "is very circumscribed," but "no genteel or Polite Person, save Mr. Kershaw an English Merchant," and a congregation of fifty "Young Ladies all drest in White of their own Spinning—Many of them Baptists." There was "a fine farm" on the head of Wateree Creek and "the best drest People that [I] have met with," but no "literate or well travel'd Person, [no] ingenious Mind ... of any Capacity." For the most part gentlemen lived near the coast where they ran their plantations and the legislature. "So rich, so luxurious, polite a People," Woodmason said of the tidewater gentry. "Yet they ... look on the poor White People [Set down here ... between the Rich Planters and the Indians] in a Meaner Light than their Black Slaves, and care less for them ..."
Woodmason himself had little sympathy for the poor settlers of Granny Quarter Creek, who were so utterly uncivilized they "had never before seen a Minister ... I was a Great Curiosity to them—And they were as great Oddities to me, ... as wild as the very Deer ... the men [dressed] in Frocks or Shirts and long trousers [with] No Shoes or Stockings." Likewise, on Flat Creek were people "as rude in their Manners as the Common Savages ... Their Dresses almost as loose and Naked as the Indians, differing in nothing save Complexion."
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Woodmason criticized women in particular for immodesty because, although a backwoods woman usually wore a linen shift next to the body, a skirted jacket called a shortgown to the waist, and a petticoat from the waist to the calves, Woodmason's female parishioners often came to meeting "bareheaded, barelegged, and barefoot with only a thin Shift and under Petticoat." He understood that "the heat ... admits not of any [but] thin clothing;" however, girls who wore shifts and petticoats tight enough to reveal "the roundness of their Breasts," their "slender Waists," and "the fineness of their Limbs" aroused his concern among other things. He complained too because they rubbed "Bears Oil" on their skin and in their hair, which they tied up behind "in a Bunch like the Indians—being hardly one degree removed from them." A true gentleman, Mr. Woodmason refused to dress down, traveling in clothes that "the Canes, and impenetrable Woods" tore to pieces. He sweated profusely under his wig and gown in church, and suffered attacks of mosquitoes and wood ticks rather than keep them off with bear grease.
In January of 1767 Woodmason preached to a large Irish congregation in the Waxhaws, a densely settled area "thro' which the dividing Line between North and South Carolina Runs." It's possible that among the "very curious" who came to hear Woodmason at the Presbyterian meetinghouse was an immigrant couple from Twelvemile Creek, Andrew Jackson and his wife Elizabeth who was seven months pregnant. Elizabeth's husband died about a month later, tradition says while working in the fields—something her unborn child would never have to worry about. By 1791 young Andrew had read law and got himself appointed prosecuting attorney and then Attorney General for the isolated Cumberland settlements of Mero District in present Tennessee.
In old age Jonathan Ramsey remembered seeing Andrew Jackson and John Overton of Louisa County, Va. enter Eaton's Station near Nashville "wearing three cornered cocked hats, the fashion then with lawyers." To the Cohees who dominated the trans-mountain west Jackson's fancy head gear carried a subtle message. It meant that he'd cast his lot with would-be aristocrats from the east, whose property rights he was there to protect. Jackson would never feel the soil between his toes as did the settlement's founder James Robertson, hoeing corn beside his slaves of a summer's morning in 1789 when Creek Indians opened fire, or have five inches of hat brim cut by a fusee ball whistling past his ear like Robertson's son Jonathan, "as good a soldier as ever pulled a trigger—great nerve—powerful strength."
Attorney Jackson came as a civilizing force, a symbol of the passing of a folk culture that had allowed people "by general consent" to appoint one of themselves to perform the rite of marriage, as James Shaw did in 1781 at French Lick Station [Nashville] for "three couples all [standing] up at the same time in the fort yard ..." Nevertheless, Jackson himself took advantage of the frontier's informal view of matrimony to marry the not-quite-divorced Rachel Donelson Robards, whose wealthy father, Colonel John Donelson, had come west by stages from the eastern shore of Old Virginia, to George's Creek in Pittsylvania County, and by flatboat down the Tennessee and up the Cumberland to Clover Bottom of Stone's River.
In 1786 Colonel Donelson became a casualty in an Indian war that had raged on and off since 1755. The threat of Indian attack would have to be eliminated before cotton and tobacco fields and porticoed brick mansions pushed aside the grain fields and log-and-stone houses of the Cohees. The term had broadened over the years to include not only the Presbyterian Irish but all dissenters from Pennsylvania and from the mountains and foothills of the upper south. Ironically, the Cohees, with almost as much to lose as the natives, had learned directly from Indians the very tactics needed to defeat them. And their clothing reflected the influence of their Indian tutors.
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| Daniel Boone, in an engraved copy of a lost 1819 Chester Harding portrait, wears a blue hunting shirt with a large collar resembling lapels. |
In 1774 flatlander Daniel Trabue so "admired the looks of" troops going against the Ohio Indians from near Richmond, uniformed all alike with cockades of red ribbon on their hats, "I would have been glad to have went with them if I had been old enough." West of the Blue Ridge, however, Cohee Alex Alexander's childhood fantasy "was to have a pair of moccasins and a hunting shirt" like the militia near his home on Irish Creek, in the limestone hills of Rockbridge County, Va.
Alexander was nine when British Colonel Banastre Tarleton chased the General Assembly over the mountains from Charlottesville. Some of Alexander's neighbors and relatives may have been with Samuel McDowell's "large force" of riflemen that turned out to guard the valley from invasion in 1781. In his memoir, Captain Francis T. Brooke indirectly commented on their unmilitary appearance, speculating that the reason they prevented him—in the uniform of a Continental officer—from proceeding to the new seat of government in Staunton was because "a regimental coat had never been seen on that side of the mountains—nothing but hunting-shirts ..."
All contemporary descriptions agree that a true hunting shirt was an open "frock" of coarse homespun or "dressed deer skins," with a cape or large collar for shedding water, but no pockets or buttons. The wearer would wrap one side of the open front over the other and tie a piece of cloth around his waist to make space inside for storing things.
In 1775 General Washington called these ubiquitous backwoods garments "Indian shirts." And it seems plausible that Indians would use trade goods to copy the capes and collars they saw on European outer wear. But James Smith—a captive among the Caunawagha Indians in western Pennsylvania and east-central Ohio during the years 1755-59—never mentions them. Could it be that the settlers of New Sweden created a prototype for the hunting shirt as a substitute coat—an "outer garment" Nathan Boone called it—that Indians may have copied and adapted? Either explanation accounts for European elements in the design.
Pennsylvania seems the likeliest birthplace of the hunting shirt. Without exception, pre-revolutionary references in the Gazettes of Pennsylvania and Virginia are to ones worn by men from the backwoods districts of Pennsylvania and the interior parts of the southern colonies settled almost exclusively by emmigrants from the waters of the Delaware and Susquehanna. In 1771 the Pennsylvania Gazette lists hunting shirts as part of the equipment captured in the North Carolina back country from regulators—most of them northern immigrants—who were defeated by provincial forces at the battle of Alamance Creek.
The earliest printed reference to a hunting shirt of which I am aware—an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette describing the clothes of George Wilkinson, a runaway from present Rockbridge County in 1768—shows that by that date hunting shirts had been around long enough for readers of the Gazette to recognize them by name. So the hunting shirt certainly existed before 1768. It's quite possible that it went by other names before finally appearing in the paper. In 1765 William King, a miller on Middle River in the Virginia Valley, was allowed a reduction of his debt in part by what it cost him to make "13 soldiers' shirts." Similarly, the Oxford English Dictionary cites the first printed reference to the flintlock musket as 1683, although Marin le Bourgeoys invented the flintlock before 1620.
Author Harriet Arnow, in her influential book Seedtime on the Cumberland, assumed the infrequent mention of hunting shirts in the will books of Middle Tennessee meant that most backwoodsmen did not wear them. But as we have seen, Edward Swanson in 1819 informed Judge John Haywood that, in fact, men around Nashville "for many years" after 1780 wore "Hunting Shirts of dressed deer Skins." These "over Clothes" of dressed (but untanned) deerskin were perishable and short-lived, but were essential in preserving the shirts, jackets and coats Arnow did find among the possessions left by the dead. In 1785 George Bedinger, a former Revolutionary rifleman in Hugh Stephenson's company, wore a "buckskin hunting shirt" in western Kentucky to protect his "camlet jacket" and a green "baise shirt" given him by fellow surveyor Captain Mayo Carrington.
In the summer of 1776, when Indians captured Daniel Boone's and Richard Callaway's daughters, Nathan Reid and Boone among others "had on pantaloons [it being Sunday]," but they sent to the fort for "breech-clouts" before pursuing the Indians. After returning to the settlements with the rescued girls, Reid—who was born to Pennsylvania Irish parents on Rockfish River in Virginia—loaned Samuel Henderson his own hunting shirt so Henderson would not have to get married in one that had become "threadbare [because of] time and rough usage." In Kentucky, as in Tennessee, purlely protective but temporary items like hunting shirts and moccasins would have been left out of inventories of personal property. Even if they were well made Indians usually got them when they stripped victims of useable clothing. Against all odds, however, they sometimes appear. One in Virginia was listed with Solomon Kendrick's "2 coats, four pair drawers ... 3 shirts, and silver buckles" when he was killed on Clinch River in 1782.
And because dissenters unceremoniously buried victims of Indian attack on the spot where they died, their hunting and work clothes were buried with them. A party from French Lick in 1782 buried Joseph Freeland on the bank of Stoner's Lick Creek where he was killed after going into the creek to wash off the ticks he picked up while skinning deer. He had "got his breeches on and was in the act of puting his shirt on [when] the Indians shot him down." The burial party removed a tomahawk from his cheekbone before burying the body "as well as we could." The Indians may have gotten Freeland's clothes; but even if they hadn't, his protective hunting garments would have been too greasy and bloody to be of any value.
To understand just how backwoodsmen dressed we must try to see them through eighteenth century eyes; something Harriet Arnow did not do, or she would have known that the rawhide "overals" a Captain Budd had made for him in 1784 along with a pair of "mockersons" on Big Creek of Holston River did not have straps and a bib like the denim overalls of twentieth century hill farmers. They were coarse trousers like the "leather pants" hunter William Baker wore in 1790 when an "enraged" buffalo bull hooked his thigh and tossed him through the air on the banks of Cumberland River below present Palmyra, Tenn.
Arnow likewise misinterpreted the pairs of drawers she saw listed in county will books. They were not underpants, although some men wore them under trousers. In reality they were breeches that came to just below the knee like the "drawers ... of coarse country linen" William Row wore with "leggins" of the same material when he ran away from near Lewisburg, W.Va. in August of 1776. And the "waistcoat of [almost white] linen" he "took with him" was obviously not one of the waistcoats Arnow imagined were "bright silk vests." A waistcoat of the period was any garment that covered the upper body to the waist. They were frequently made of wool or flannel, and often had sleeves like a jacket.
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| German woodcuts of Continental riflemen from descriptions brought back by Hessian mercenaries. The fringed linsey hunting shirts and trousers are accurate enough. However, depictions of some riflemen as barefoot may have been because moccasins made them appear shoeless. The bayonets are an artistic conceit. Rifles were hunting weapons unequipped with lugs for bayonets. |
A preference for plain but "civilized" clothing shows it was never the intention of back settlers to go entirely native. The coarse, serviceable frock worn by Indians came in handy for hunting, hence the name hunting shirt. Joseph Doddridge suggested the hunting shirt's specific purpose when he said "Indian dress" was worn "especially" by woodsmen and warriors "much in habit of hunting, and going on scouts and campaigns." Brothers Joseph and Nathaniel Evans of present Sevier County, Tenn. are a case in point. They both "dressed like Indians" to recover horses stolen in 1792, and in the Creek war of 1813 Joseph, born in Virginia about the year 1770, served as pilot in the company of Capt. James Bell who told Lyman Draper that Joseph "always wore his hunting shirt, carried his rifle and was a capital shot."
Their preoccupation with hunting is the reason New Englanders called backwoods riflemen "buckskins." During the Revolution Yankees no doubt got an ear full of stories such as James Knox from near Wolf Hills (Abingdon, Va.) might have told in camp at Saratoga and Stillwater about a time in Kentucky when Indians ripped open the bales of deerskins he and his companions had carefully stored, exposing them to wolves and weather.
It was simple enough to make a hunting shirt if the need arose. In 1770 Samuel Holiday imaginged his "Irish servant man" would make a hunting shirt from "a coarse sheet" he stole when he ran off from the Juniata in Pennsylvania. And in the spring of 1780 Virginia surveyor Daniel Smith "used 11 dollars ... for the making of a hunting shirt" at "Gaspar Manscoe's Lick" in middle Tennessee, showing that Smith either bought material to make one himself or hired someone to do it for him. The primitive state of the Cumberland settlements in 1780 suggests that the tailor—whoever he or she was—used deerskin. Smith doesn't say.
Only after the people had built looms did they make light-weignt summer hunting shirts of tow linen—sun-bleached because impurities in the flax made it difficult to dye. In cool weather they used linsey-woolsey, often dyed brown with black walnut hulls, yellowish with "butternut" hulls, and even red with pokeberry juice. Fanciful tailors and seamstresses often "ornamented" the edges of capes, the bottoms of skirts, and facings and cuffs with a few or "a great many" fringes of contrasting "ravelled" cloth. In 1776 bond servant James Conner "had on a white hunting shirt, much fringed" when he made off from present Morgan County, W.Va., and John Ceaton's "white hunting shirt" had "striped wristbands" when he ran away from near Staunton in 1770.
But in spite of decorative touches the hunting shirt's primary function was protection, including protection against the cold. Many wore them as an extra layer over "warm waistcoats" (jackets of flannel or wool) like the one John Cock had on in December of 1781 when the Cherokee sank a tomahawk in his brain outside of John English's cabin on Clinch River, leaving him partially paralyzed for life. The Indians took a piece of his waistcoat with them as well as his hunting shirt and scalp. Keeping warm and dry seems also to have been on the mind of Hugh F. Bell, enveloped in the loose folds of a hunting shirt near Nashville on a sleety day in January 1789 when Indians from ambush only fifteen feet away riddled it with seventeen holes. Only three balls "penetrated his body."
General Washington recommended hunting shirts to the Continental army partly as a means of keeping the men "cool in warm weather, and warm in cool weather." But although a backwoodsman's dual role as hunter and Indian fighter required prolonged exposure to the elements, comfort was not the only reason for wearing a hunting shirt in the army. It was also a part of a backwoodsman's war dress, a unique reminder that he was among the very few in the army with experience in genuine warfare.
The backwoodsman's warrior status is the main reason Congress, in early summer of 1775, called on Pennsylvania to raise nine companies of riflemen from counties with borders on or close to the frontier—two from Lancaster County, two from Cumberland, and one each from Northampton, Berks, Northumberland, York, and Bedford. Additional rifle companies were raised from outside Pennsylvania—two from Maryland, and two from Virginia, one recruited by Michael Cresap from the upper branches of the Potomac, and another by Daniel Morgan from the Shenandoah Valley. But there was virtually no difference between riflemen from Pennsylvania and those from Maryland and Virginia. Like their commanders, these backwoods troops all shared ties to the Delaware Valley and adjacent areas.
About the year 1710 Michael Cresap's father, Thomas Cresap, arrived in the Scandinavian settlements of the lower Susquehanna and moved steadily westward, up the Susquehanna to Wright's Ferry, over the Blue Ridge to Antietam Creek, and finally to Oldtown, Md. where Michael was born. Daniel Morgan, born in 1736 on the Delaware in present Hunterdon County, N.J., performed odd jobs as he drifted through Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley and into the Shenandoah Valley around 1754.
Almost as soon as these warriors strode out of the woods they transformed the look of the army. On August 31, 1775 New Jersey's Committee of Safety "Resolved, That the ... Minutemen in this province ... are directed, for the sake of distinction and convenience, to adopt, as their uniform, hunting frocks, as near as may be similar to those of the Riflemen now in the continental service." In 1776 a substantial portion of the regular army adopted hunting shirts because "the bounty of clothing ... provided by Congress [made it] impracticable to obtain a sufficient quantity of cloth for regimental coats." In other words, necessity forced Jersey militiamen, southern Tuckahoes, and New England Yankees into hunting shirts. Only a backwoodsman wore one because it suited his fancy.
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| Daniel Morgan of the Shenandoah Valley—teamster, brawler, and Revolutionary general—wears trousers (also called overalls) trimmed with fringe. The round-brimmed hat at his foot, turned up on one side, and pinned with a buck's tail cockade, is much more typical of backwoodsmen than the coonskin cap of myth. |
When Cresap's riflemen "from the Mountains and back Woods" passed through Frederick, Md. on their way to join the army near Boston, one resident wrote with obvious pride that they were "painted like Indians [and] dressed in hunting Shirts and Mockasons." That same summer the appearance of Daniel Morgan's Virginians so impressed American painter John Trumbull, then a soldier in the Continental Army at Cambridge, Mass., that he later wrote admiringly of the rifleman's "elegant loose dress reaching to the middle thigh, ornamented with a great many fringes ... meeting the pantaloons of the same material and color, fringed and ornamented in a corresponding style."
A Connecticut Yankee, Trumbull was obviously unfamiliar with the term hunting shirt. Nevertheless, he bristled at a suggestion that this unique style of uniform was anything like a wagoner's frock, "a long coarse shirt reaching below the knee." The hunting shirt was shorter and open in front like a coat, and no more resembled a wagoner's frock, he said, than a coat resembled a cloak.
Seventeen-year-old John Joseph Henry, also in camp at Cambridge, wore "a deep ash-colored hunting shirt" in the rifle company of Matthew Smith, who in 1763 had been a leader of the Indian-hating Paxton Boys. Henry's grandfather Robert Henry was an Irish Protestant, an immigrant to the Delaware in 1722, and a settler on Doe Run in Chester County, Pa. His father, William, became a Lancaster gunsmith, learning to make rifles from German master Matthias Roesser. And his uncle John Henry took him to trade with Indians at the wilderness outpost of Detroit in 1772.
In his memoir Henry wrote "it was the silly fashion of those times for riflemen to ape the manners of savages," wearing leggings and moccasins "if the latter could be procured." On the wilderness expedition to seize Quebec in 1775 Henry saw Daniel Morgan himself dressed in "leggins and a cloth in the Indian style. His thighs ... exposed to view ... lacerated by the thorns and bushes."
Henry's leggings, which he wore over "half worn buckskin breeches," were not Indian leggings like Morgan's. They were of a style called "Indian boots," described by British traveler J.D.F. Smyth as "leggings ... of coarse woollen cloth, that either are wrapped round loosely and tied with garters, or are laced upon the outside, and always come better than half way up the thigh."
The rifleman's long trousers described by Trumbull were obviously not part of his Indian dress, but they were likewise a staple garment of the backwoods since early times. In 1725 Quaker Robert Parke, who lived in a log house a few miles northeast of Robert Henry's Doe Run homestead, wrote back to Ireland that linen trousers were "breeches & Stockings all in one [and] fine Cool wear in Summer." And J.D.F. Smyth observed that backwoodsmen near the Carolina-Virginia border dressed "more frequently [in] thin trowsers" than in breeches "made of Indian dressed elk, or deer skins." Riflemen evidently wore Indian leggings or Indian boots in the wilderness, and fringed trousers and shoes in gentler country. Nevertheless, General Washington asked Morgan in 1777 to "gall" the British flanks in New Jersey with "a Company or two of Woods Men [dressed] in the right Indian Style ... screaming and yelling as the Indians do."
In his remenissences of the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier Joseph Doddridge emphasizes the eclectic nature of backwoods attire—partly civilized and partly Indian. John Joseph Henry, for instance, wore a hunting shirt over "a roundabout jacket, of woolen" on the Quebec campaign. A more detailed picture of a backwoodsman's civilized "under dress," can be derived from any number of contemporary newspaper descriptions of backwoods runaways. The Pennsylvania Gazette, for instance, tells us in 1772 that John Baker "had on, and took with him, when he went away [from Brock's Gap in the Shenandoah Valley], two hunting shirts, one of deer leather, the other of tow linen," but also "two jackets, without sleeves, one blue cloth, the other white halfthick, [and] a tow linen shirt." We likewise find in the Virginia Gazette that John Thrift wore "a brown hunting shirt [and] a light coloured sagathy waistcoat" when he ran away from McKittrick's Branch in 1775; and Ned Barry wore "a white hunting shirt [over a] white coat of country made cloth, and a striped linsey jacket" when he escaped from near Staunton in 1776.
Others got away with not much else on their backs but hunting shirts. Christopher Dolton took only "three old shirts" in addition to "an old hunting shirt" from "Calf Pasture" River in 1771; and Thomas Welsh apparently wore only "a hunting shirt filled with wool" (i.e. of linsey-woolsey) when he disappeared in 1775 with a "smooth-bore gun" from near "English ferry on New river." In the same year two African slaves and a white convict servant in "linsey frocks" stole "a Rifle and ... a large Buck-skin and Elk-skin" from Jacob Brake on the South Fork of the Potomac in Hampshire County when they decided to make for sea ports and ships home. The fact that these convicts and slaves were the property of masters who had come to the Virginia backwoods from colonies bordering the Delaware demonstrates further that the hunting shirt started there and traveled west and south on the backs of immigrants.
Also in the Virginia Gazette are descriptions of fourteen deserters in hunting shirts who took leave of their Continental regiments near Williamsburg in the years 1776 and '77. Ten of the fourteen were identified by their commanders as recruits from the backwoods attempting to return to homes in the west: one in "a blue hunting shirt" to Frederick County, one in "an old hunting shirt dyed black" to Pittsylvania, five in "hunting shirts trimmed with red" to Amherst County, and three in "dark coloured hunting shirts" to Halifax. They were mostly from rifle companies recruited in the shadow of the Blue Ridge or in country adjacent to the Carolina Road (Highway 15)—a migration route from Pennsylvania next in importance only to the Great Road up Valley.
| Shawnee chief Col. John Lewis in 1825. As a token of respect, he bore the name of a Continental officer, a grandson of the John Lewis who settled in the Valley of Virginia (c. 1732). He wears a caped hunting shirt over a ruffled shirt. Usually made of textiles, not buckskin, they were also known as "Indian shirts" or "rifle shirts," and were worn by backwoodsmen while hunting or as a militia uniform. Along with leggings and moccasins, the hunting shirt formed a part of what was known as "Indian dress." |  |
In 1775 a corps of "minutemen" from Virginia's Culpeper County—which straddled the Carolina Road, and hugged the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge in present Fauquier, Rappahannock, and Madison Counties—turned out in "hunting shirts made of strong brown linen ... on the breast of each in large white letters the words 'Liberty or Death'!" The gentlefolk of Williamsburg should be forgiven if they wondered whose death? when they laid eyes on these men with buck tails in their hats, and tomahawks and scalping knives hanging from shot pouch straps. As seventeen-year-old private Philip Slaughter noted in his journal, "Many People hearing that we were from the backwoods, near the Indians, and seeing our dress, were as much afraid of us for a few days as if we had been Indians."
In the same year, west of the Blue Ridge, Philip Fithian describes backwoods troops at Winchester, Va. "All in a Hunting-Shirt Uniform & Bucks Tale in their Hats [to represent that they are hardy resolute, & invincible Natives of the Woods of America]—Indeed," he said, "they make a grand Figure." The irony of hunting shirts was that these warriors who were so proud of their "Indian-like dress" were copying Indians who may have been copying Europeans. Nevertheless, they created a stir in eastern society who believed these white men were as alien to European culture as the Indians themselves. Even Governor Dunmore, who knew them, declared in 1774 to the secretary of state for the colonies that "back-woods-men [were] Hunters like the Indians and equally ungovernable."
Attitudes had changed since the French War, when all provincial forces campaigning with the British wore the regimental uniforms of colonial militia. General John Forbes' campaign to capture Fort Duquesne in 1758 changed all that. Colonel George Washington, commander of 1st Virginia Regiment on the expedition, put his men into "Indian dress" he believed was "unbecoming" but practical—clothing with which many of his men were already familiar. Certainly Major Andrew Lewis and his men, who in 1756 had pushed through thick brush along Sandy Creek to strike the Shawnee towns before weather and starvation turned them back, were accustomed to wearing moccasins, leggings, and breech clouts in the woods, as was another of Washington's men, Indian trader Samuel Stalnaker, who spent much of his time in the woods between his home on the middle fork of Holston and the Cherokee nation. Colonel Henry Bouquet, second in command of the British forces, was more than satisfied with the men's appearance. "Thank God," he wrote Washington, "we see nothing but shirts and Blanketts."
The shirts were probably hunting shirts, a term that wasn't used until years later. But just because Bouquet didn't mention them by name doesn't mean hunting shirts weren't there. He said nothing about breech clouts and Indian leggings either. But we know Washington's men wore them because Washington referred to them specifically in correspondence. Even as late as Dunmore's War in 1774, when the thigh-length frock had already earned the name "hunting shirt," Colonel William Christian used Bouquet's nonspecific language to describe Andrew Lewis' backwoods army as well supplied with "Shirts, Blankets, [and] Leggons." There is no doubt Christian meant hunting shirts, as we see by Captain William Russell's report that his Clinch River men were "badly fix'd, for want of Hunting shirts, and Blankets; But as I hear Mr. Branders Waggon, is on this side New River; I hope we shall get supply'd."
By their choice of clothing backwoods soldiers told the world that, like Indians, they placed a premium on individual combat, and fought as they did against the Shawnee at Point Pleasant in 1774, "not compact—but ... every man fighting for himself pretty much ... except once in a while ... when a squad of daring men would concert and make a dash (as we used to call it)." These dashes were led by "officers [who] fought but a good deal like the Indians, leaders rather than commanders. So that command was more nominal than real; and in fighting it was always expected the officers would lead on ..."
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| Cherokee warrior Hop Frog wears a hunting shirt with a collar similar to Boone's (above). |
It helped officers to "lead on" if they looked like their men. In 1781 William Martin remembered seeing his father, Major Joseph Martin, return from a campaign against the Cherokee in a "hunting shirt and leather leggins" instead of his usual knee breeches, stockings, coat, skirted vest, and neck stock. Five years earlier General Griffith Rutherford wore "a dingy colored ordinary" hunting shirt against the Cherokee, to show his men dressed "principally [in] rude cloth made from Hemp, Tow and wild Nettlebark"—some with "LIBERTY OR DEATH" in white letters on black hunting shirts—that he too was a warrior.
In 1789 one of Rutherford's proteges, a young cousin from Halifax County, Va., Major Robert Weakley, joined fifty horsemen from near Nashville on the trail of thirty Creeks who had attacked Robertson's Station. To prevent ambush Weakley had the men dismount on Knob Creek (in present Maury County, Tenn.). He assumed command of twenty-three volunteers, including Andrew Jackson, and followed the Indians to Duck River where he and Sampson Williams "crept through the cane" and watched as one of the Creeks on the southern bank "rudely" bowed a captured fiddle. Weakley sent runners to Knob Creek with orders to bring up the rest of the men and post them opposite the Indian camp while he and Williams led their men in pairs though arm-pit-deep water at "a shoal ford" a mile upstream. They groped in "the dark of the moon" to a spot where they laid up, waiting for the dew to keep the cane from crackling underfoot. In the pre-dawn light they split into two wings and, "in the form of a halfmoon," assaulted the camp, driving the Indians across the river where the rest of the men had been posted. Major Weakley commenced the attack, dashing ahead to a tree and firing two rifle balls into the chest of an Indian who had got up on "his shanks to punch up the fire ... the Indians raised the whoop—the whites also raised the yell ..." A few Indians were wounded; most escaped. And as was customary after a successful engagement the whites appropriated Indian moccasins, leggings, and deer skins.
It was common practice for Indians and whites to strip vanquished adversaries and wear their clothes as trophies of victory or revenge. On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1763 "Mr. Michael Cresap arrive[d] in [Frederick Town, Md.] with Mokosins on his Legs, taken from an Indian whom he killed and scalped, being one of those who shot down Mr. Welder."
There was often a more practical use for plunder, however. In 1787, following a raid on the Chickamauga village of Coldwater (Tuscumbia, Ala.), soldiers from the Cumberland River divided "about two thousand deer and bear skins." The rest of the "Indian goods" went on "public sale" at Eaton's station, and brought in "upwards of five thousand dollars [to be] apportioned among the men; but like all such sales, credit was given, notes taken, and little or nothing ever collected." According to Thomas Hickman the real value of the plunder, which included a number of "striped silk shirts," was to provide clothes for "the needy backwoods pioneers."
Poverty was ever the curse of people on the cutting edge, forced to remain in forts, their herds and crops at the mercy of predators and Indians. In 1780 settlers in the mountains of southwest Virginia petitioned the governor for tax relief, blaming Indians, a frosty growing season, and "the uncommon severity of the winter" for scanty crops and beeves that were so poor they were unfit to sell or slaughter for food. Hard cash was in "few hands and by no means dispersed among the generality of the Inhabitants." In 1782 specie was again "securely kept by the few who have had foresight enough to gather it," and the petitioners requested that deerskins, which they used as currency, be added to a list of commodities acceptable as taxes.
In 1749 dire necessity pushed settlers on the Potomac near Licking Creek to adopt inexpensive alternatives to civilized clothing. It was here that Moravians Leonhardt Schnell and John Brandmuller met an entire German family "clothed in Indian fashion" not for reasons of utility or because they admired the look, but because goods and stores were scarce and they were poor. Forty years later Benjamin Allen from Warm Springs Run, just a few miles away, was able to buy a winter coat of frieze cloth in Hancock, Md. only to have it taken from him the next year by Shawnee captors in Kentucky. In place of his coat the Indians gave him two calico hunting shirts to wear in the snow with his vest, long pants, and moccasins.
Farther to the south Schnell and Brandmuller found "the manner of living rather poor" west of North Mountain where home seekers from near the Delaware had only recently arrived to be the cutting edge of Virginia's frontier. On Cowpasture River the missionaries shared the last of their bread with the family of Hercules Wilson, "as the people had none," and accepted bear meat in return. East of present Clifton Forge they discussed religion with Mr. and Mrs. James Scott over a breakfast of hominy and buttermilk. And just west of Eagle Rock, on Craig's Creek, in present Botetourt County, they spent the night on bear skins with John Crawford's family among a people they said lived "like savages," and whose "clothes ... consist of deer skins." But the Wilsons, Scotts, and Crawfords didn't intend to eke out a living from the woods forever. They endured deerskin clothing, bearskin bedding, and a diet of "Johnny cakes, deer and bear meat" with a belief that things must get better.
Indians killed one of the Crawfords and wounded another on Craig's Creek in 1757, but John Crawford stuck it out, and in 1774 he provided lodging for William Fleming who stopped there on his way to Staunton after the battle of Point Pleasant. In the intervening quarter century the Crawfords' clothing must have improved from what it was in 1749 when "hunting [was the people's] chief occupation."
For decades conditions of poverty contintued to persist wherever the edge of white settlement touched the wilderness. In 1831, on the San Bernard river in Texas, Noah Smithwick dined with the family of Thomas B. Bell all "dressed in buckskin," ranged on stools around a clapboard table in a "little pole-cabin," eating from wooden platters with cane forks and their butcher and pocket knives, and drinking milk from cups of "little wild cymlings, scraped and scoured until they looked as white and clean as earthenware." It was a way of life that had traveled cross country since the first Bells from Ireland had settled among the Finns and Swedes of northeastern Maryland. And yet, said Smithwick, "in the course of time the pole cabin gave place to a handsome brick house [and] their rude furnishings [to] the best the country had to offer."
In the fall of 1773 five-year-old George Christian, at his father's camp on Reedy Creek of Holston, encountered Daniel Boone "dressed in deerskin collord black" as mourning for his son James, murdered by Indians in Powell Valley while driving cattle for what would have been the first white settlement in Kentucky. But Boone was a poor man. In 1771 he had returned destitute from a long hunt, robbed twice by Indians and in debt to investors for the cost of lead, powder, and traps. In 1773 he had sold all his land, and after turning back from his first attempt to settle in Kentucky moved into a vacant cabin on David Gass' Clinch River farm. When George Christian saw him it isn't likely he had the means to dress as decently as when he appeared in 1781 at the Virginia Assembly in a "common jeans suit." Nevertheless, even in Richmond, Va. Boone couldn't resist wearing buckskin "leggins beded vary neately ... by the Indians."
While many of Boone's neighbors bought osnaburg, striped cotton, Irish linen, hanks of silk, broadcloth, and buckram at Evan Shelby's store in the winter of '72-3, others as poor as Boone resorted to nettles and buckskin for clothing. The only purchase recorded for Boone that year was on January 26, 1773 when Shelby extended him enough credit for "17 1/2 lbs. loaf sugar [and] 2 quarts rum."
No doubt Shelby figured the hunter's credit was good enough. Boone might be on his feet after another season. Killing deer, preparing and transporting the hides, was arduous but potentially lucrative work. If a hunter were skillful or lucky enough to avoid robbery he could make a fortune. In 1767 near the "roundabout" on Smith River, in present Henry County Va., Elisha Walling, who "never cultivated the soil" but "always returned home with his horses laden with skins and furs," could afford to keep a slave, Jake, probably to grow food while he hunted. In better times Boone also belied the stereotype of hunters as less well off than frontier farmers, and could afford a watch that he "plade away at dise," a pocket flask for his rum, and a copy of Gulliver's Travels to read aloud to fellow hunters.
In fact, most hunters settled down once age had caught up with them. In 1784 schoolmaster John Filson ghosted an autobiography of fifty-year-old Daniel Boone "formerly a hunter," and in 1785 William Martin met long hunter Isaac Bledsoe who, at fifty, "was rather old for the woods."
In later life these "common finders of Back Lands" often became paid guides. James Burke and Charles St. Clair ("a white man in Indian garb") demanded rich tracts from James Patton for their services. And some like Boone learned to survey a little. Virginia Governor David Campbell of Washington County remembered that Elisha Walling and his brother Thomas "located lands in both Virginia and [Tennessee] ... near the line of the two States," getting their names "mixed up ... with almost every old land claim [either as] first owners or locater or chain carrier when the survey was made." At fifty, Walling had apparently done all right for himself. In 1785 at Calland's store on Dan River in Pittsylvania County, Va. Walling bought "a fine apron ... handkerchie ... and silk" to take home to his wife and daughters on Holston. But even at sixty he hadn't settled down. When John Redd called at Walling's cabin eighteen miles above Knoxville in 1796 "his wife informed me that he had ... been absent a month" on a hunt.
Extended stays in the wilderness—often close to two years—made it impossible for hunters not to exchange linsey for leather garments. As long hunter James Dysart told his son, once the hunters had put civilization behind them they depended upon their rifles for food and clothing. In autumn of 1766 Pennsylvania backwoodsman James Smith left his "good clothes" at the home of George Adams near Fort Chiswell in southwest Virginia before traveling into the wilderness "south of Kentucky" with William Baker, Uriah Stone, Joshua Horton, and Horton's eighteen-year-old "mulatto" servant Jamie. At the start Smith and his companions likely wore linsey hunting shirts, leather breeches, and "Indian boots." In these work clothes they would have made as rough an appearance as convict servant George Wilkinson "in June of 1768" when he ran away from "the forks of James river" in "a new felt hat, hunting shirt and callico waistcoat, with old buckskin breeches, blue leggings, and old shoes." Smith's party would have worn moccasins for wilderness travel.
They had got as far west as the mouth of Tennessee River when Smith swapped horses for ammunition and the loan of Jamie and turned back. In October 1767, a year after they had set out, Smith and Jamie appeared on the Carolina frontier wearing buckskin leggings attached to belts over which hung the flaps of breech clouts, exposing hips and buttocks to view and the weather.
Smith's jacket and shirt had long since been torn into rags by canebrakes and underbrush, but he still wore his broad hat of beaver felt, and for the rest made do with items furnished by acquaintances who had recently moved to Carolina from Pennsylvania—"a white shirt [he] wore loose, and an old blanket" he threw over his shoulders like an Indian match coat. Jamie continued to cover his skin with skins, and was wearing "a bearskin dressed with the hair on ... and a raccoon-skin cap" when Smith delivered him to "Mr. Horton's negro-quarter [at] Fort Chissel."
At George Adams' Smith made himself presentable in the clothes he left on the way out. They were probably similar to those Samuel Kercheval said were worn by early settlers on the Shenandoah: a broad-brim hat of wool or beaver felt; a plain linen stock buckled around a narrow shirt collar; a broad-backed coat with a "straight short skirt" and outside pockets with large flaps; a waistcoat skirted half-way to the knees; breeches (known also as small clothes) fastened with brass or silver buckles above stockings tied up with red or blue garters; and a pair of coarse leather shoes.
In 1779 Loyalist raiders came to the home of former long hunter John Cox, near his Peach Bottom fort west of New River, and took three of his "five Rifle Guns." They held Cox for a while and released him. A short time later they returned and took his "Stallion, Saddle and Bridle," and made him hand over the clothes he was wearing, a "new Coat [and] Breeches ... with his Pocket Book, papers and all the money ..." In 1761 Cox had been a member of Elisha Walling's party, one of the first white hunters in Kentucky. But in 1779 he obviously preferred wearing his new coat when he wasn't chasing bear through brush. His breeches may have been linsey, or buckskin like the "leather pair of small clothes" an escaped captive found and "drawed on" at a deserted hunter's camp.
Judging by Cox's deposition the kidnappers left him in his shirt, stockings and shoes—or perhaps moccasins. Because as much as backwoods settlers objected to wearing buckskin on their backs, they didn't seem to mind it on their feet, and showed an actual fondness for moccasins. Like Indians, they cut single pieces from deerskin, and used awls and thin leather "whangs" to sew moccasins with a gathering stitch from toe to ankle, and with a seam in the heel, leaving flaps that could be turned down or tied up to keep out pebbles, dirt, and snow. Near present Shirleysburg, Pa. Philip Fithian wrote in his journal that although it was "the custom in these back Woods almost universally with Women, to go barefooted.—Men in common I observe wear Mockisons, or Indian's Shoes."
The childhood necessity of going without shoes in the backwoods conditioned most young men, especially in spring and summer, to prefer moccasins made of deerskin "dressed soft as for gloves or breeches." James Robertson, the founder of Nashville, for instance, "was fond of wearing moccasons even in after life when necessity no longer required it." And although a combination of moisture and rawhide caused backwoodsmen to suffer "scald feet," they waterproofed moccasins as well as they could, leaving on buffalo wool and turning it to the inside for dryness and warmth, stuffing in deer hair like Daniel Boone, or lining them with "dry beach or white oak leaves" like George Bedinger to cope with "the severity of the season." Bedinger even kept his moccasins frozen "in order to prevent the leaves within from becoming wet and uncomfortable."
The problem with moccasins was that their soft texture and pliability also made them extremely porous, "a decent way of going barefooted" Doddridge said. And moisture made them not only uncomfortable but perishable, so that they always needed repairing or replacing. Numerous entries in Dr. Thomas Walker's journal of 1749-50 show what a struggle it was for him and his companions to keep themselves from going barefoot in the Kentucky wilderness. Near the beginning of the journey, on Clover Creek west of Cumberland Gap, Walker made a new "pair of Indian Shoes, those I brought out being bad," and near his journey's end he paused "nigh the top of Alleghany Ridge" to shave, shift, and make "new Shoes" before descending to the settlements on Jackson's River.
The fact that in September of 1775 James Ewing, from Wright's Ferry on the Susquehanna, was worried that a stolen pair of "whitish Indian leggings and mockasons" might cause people to mistake his runaway servant for "a backwoods man" suggests how popular moccasins were on the frontier. A real backwoods man, Frederick Stump, born in Heidelberg Township in present Lebanon County, Pa., certainly wore moccasins since childhood, and was still wearing "Mockasons" with his blue leggings, leather breeches, light brown coat, and blue great coat when a mob broke him out of Carlisle jail in 1768. Stump, with help from his servant John Ironcutter, had murdered six Indians at his home on Middle Creek, and killed four more in their camp a few miles upstream. Unlike Stump, Ironcutter was a native German, a new comer to the backwoods who walked away from jail in "Shoes with Brass Buckles."
Winter was time for a father to think about providing shoes for his daughters' naked feet, and getting his sons to exchange deer for cow hide blacked with lard and soot and sealed with tallow. In the Pennsylvania backwoods Joseph Doddridge's father made his family's shoes of home-tanned leather that was "coarse but substantially good," boasting that "no woman could spin shoe thread as well as he could." And Oliver Johnson remembered waiting anxiously in winter until his sisters had been shod. The boys generally didn't get shoes until around Christmas. "I guess [Pap] thought it made us tough and healthy to go barefoot in the frost," he said. And rifleman John Joseph Henry marched from Cambridge on September 11, 1775 in moccasins, but "[closely hoarded] a pair of tolerably good shoes" until October, when the "piercingly cold" Canadian weather forced him to change footwear. His shoes eventually split at the heel, but he tied them on with bark to make them last.
Considerations other than comfort also dictated styles of foot wear. According to Oliver Johnson, "grown girls" wanting to "fix up" for Sunday meeting wouldn't put on shoes and stockings "until they come in sight of the meetin house," and afterwards "wouldn't be more than out of sight when they would take em off ... they was so used to goin barefoot their shoes felt a mighty sight more comfortable carried in the hand." And John Joseph Henry, on his way home from British captivity following the failed expedition to Quebec, borrowed money at the Harp and Crown in Philadelphia to "exchange ... leggings and moccasins, for a pair of stockings and shoes." He wanted to be presentable when he arrived home in Lancaster. Wedding infares and house warmings likewise required some formality, and dancing on new-made puncheon floors required footwear that could stand up to splinters. Wedding guests in Kentucky or Tennessee may have been as resourceful as some who faced the same problem in east Texas in 1831. When the boys in shoes "had danced a turn," said Noah Smithwick, "they generously exchanged footgear with the moccasined contingent, and we just literally kicked every splinter off the floor before morning."
One alternative that mediated between the short-lived comfort of moccasins and the more substantial but uncomfortable cowhide shoes was the shoepack, essentially a moccasin that didn't meet at the top in a gathering stitch, but was attached by a gathering stitch to a tongue piece like the modern day "moc toe." The shoepack sometimes included a sole. Of nine references to shoepacks in the Pennsylvania Gazette between the years 1731 and 1778 seven were to runaway servants who escaped from various places in southeastern Pennsylvania and West Jersey—from "Socken above the Great Swamp," from Newtown, Bucks County, Perkiomen Creek, Darby Township, Nicholson's Gap, and Cohansey Creek. The other two references were to runaways from the Virginia Valley, one in 1768 from near Staunton, and the last in 1778 from the Mossy Creek Iron Works in Augusta County, Va., owned by Henry Miller, who had come to the Valley from Berks County, Pa. with the family of Squire Boone, and was Daniel Boone's frequent hunting companion in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
But if a partiality for buckskin footwear fits our stereotype of backwoodsmen, their reluctance to wear raccoon skin caps does not. Frederick Stump's accomplice, John Ironcutter, wore "an old felt hat" like the ones newspapers commonly called "fur," "beaver," "castor," or "raccoon" hats, which should never be confused with skin caps. As late as the 1820s and '30s Oliver Johnson recalled fashionable bell-crowned hats were made of raccoon fur in the Indiana backwoods. They "looked purty slick [when they was smoothed up]," he said, but they "fuzzed up like an old mad coon for sure" when "they got rained on." Johnson's father refused to wear the "bell-crown style" of his day for the same reason backwoodsmen west of the Blue Ridge refused to wear cocked hats a century earlier: fancy head gear "made him feel stuck up." Like most dissenters, Mr. Johnson "always wore a plain, broad-brim wool hat."
In the eighteenth century any backwoodsman wearing a three-cornered cocked hat risked being derided by his neighbors as a "Macaroni," an upper class dandy. At Boonesborough in 1778 North Carolina lowlander William Bailey Smith wore a "Maccaroni hat" to a parley with besieging Indians to impress them he was a person of high rank among the whites. Most frontiersmen scorned three-cornered hats and would probably agree with a Draper correspondent who thought the "old Revolutionary cocked hat" surveyor George Bedinger's wore in 1785 was "an oddity" on a par with the feathered "wild grey goose" skin cap worn by his chain carrier.
Most backwoodsmen preferred what was known as a "flapped" or "flopped" hat, with a flexible brim that could be "flapped before," pulled down in front to shield eyes from the weather like the "broad brimed hat" a New Jersey laborer wore when he jumped bail in Gloucester County in 1785, and "which he generally [wore] flopped down." J.D.F. Smyth says southern backwoodsmen wore flapped hats "of a reddish hue, proceeding from the intensely hot beams of the sun." These should not be confused with the skin caps Peter Kalm says settlers of New Sweden "provided with flaps."
The "fur caps" mentioned by Kalm may have resembled the "catskin hunting cap" of Maryland volunteer John Neilson, who also wore a hunting shirt when he deserted in 1776. But Scandinavian decendents like Neilson were not the only ones to wear identifiable species on their heads. According to Hugh F. Bell hunters sometimes used the skin of a bear's head as a cap and the rest of the hide as a coat, putting their arms into the hollow forelegs as if they were sleeves. But these genuine bear skins should never be confused with the shaggy woolen material known as "bearskin" used in the eighteenth century for overcoats. One Draper correspondent who lived at Kearn's fort on the Monongahela River remembered his father buying a woolen "bear-skin coat" for a trip to Williamsburgh, but wouldn't wear it in the backwoods "for fear people would think he was proud."
From all accounts, coonskin head coverings like that worn by James Smith's companion Jamie were extremely rare. "Some coonskin caps was worn," Oliver Johnson says of Indiana in the 1820's, "but not many with the tail left on." One early reference indicates they were of Indian origin. At Fort Pitt in 1777 Captain Samuel Brady ordered "Indian spy" George Roush of Hampshire County, W.Va. "to tan his thighs and legs with wild cherry and white oak bark and [to put on] a breechcloth, leather leggins, [and] moccasins ..." Complying with orders, Roush painted his face red "with three black stripes across the cheeks ... a signification of war," and topped it all off with a cap "made out of a raccoon skin, with the feathers of a hawk, painted red, fastened to the top." Still, counterfeit Indians were an odd enough sight in the Kentucky settlements of 1780 that a Mr. Cassidy, alarmed by what he thought were Indians outside his station, "fired at a couple of spies ... in Indian dress, and killed one of them."
At the time of Mr. Cassidy's unfortunate accident Indian clothing had been used as a guerilla disguise for a quarter century. In December of 1756, in the aftermath of Braddock's defeat, Washington wrote to Captain John Ashby at his fort on Patterson's Creek, "it is impossible to get clothing here [Winchester] for your men. I think none so proper for Rangers as Match-coats: therefore would advise you to procure them." A match coat was better in the woods than a military greatcoat because it was a light-weight robe a warrior draped over his shoulders in the cold and tied round his waist, allowing him to move quickly and quietly through the brush. Before Europeans came, Indians made them from the matched skins of fur-bearing animals like otter and beaver; but by the eighteenth century most were made of blanket-like material.
Washington could remember a time in December of 1753 when he "tied [himself] up in a Match Coat," and in leggings and moccasins walked through the snow to the French posts in northern Pennsylvania with Christopher Gist "fitted in the same manner." In North Carolina Daniel Boone hugged his young son, James, close inside his own "blanket coat" to save him from the cold on a winter hunt in the Blue Ridge. And in February of 1764 Pennsylvanians near Germantown described a party of Indian-hating vigilantes from Paxton Township as dressed in "blanket coats and moccasins, like our Indian traders or back country wagoners, all armed with rifles and tomahawks, and some with pistols stuck in their belts."
By October of 1757 Washington realized if the British couldn't recruit southern Indians to fight for them, they would have to make do with the next best thing. The "men most proper" he said should be "huntsmen, who have been used to arms from their childhood, and in a particular manner acquainted with the country from which many have been drove." In May of 1758 Washington touted Indian dress for the 1st Virginia Regiment preparing for General John Forbes' campaign against Fort Duquesne, and wrote to Philadelphia for "as much green half-thick's as will make Indian-leggings for 1,000 men." "If green cannot be had," he wrote to David Franks, "get white; if there is not enough of that, then get any other colour." His official excuse was that his men were "very bare of Cloathes (Regimentals, I mean)." In reality he was determined to use his troops the way the French used Indians. "Were I left to pursue my own inclinations," he wrote, "I wou'd not only order the Men to adopt the Indian dress, but cause the Officers to do it also, and be the first to set the example myself, leaving my Regimentals at this place and proceeding as light as any Indian in Woods."
At the end of June Washington dispatched Major Andrew Lewis of Augusta County with two hundred men wearing breech clouts and leggings to the British encampment near Raystown (Bedford, Pa.). He must have breathed a sigh of relief when second in command Colonel Henry Bouquet enthusiastically endorsed the new uniform. "Their dress should be our pattern in the expedition," he wrote Washington. It was probably the first time some of these men who had worn moccasins and leggings from necessity were praised for looking like Indians. Washington immediately sent a quartermaster from Fort Cumberland "with all the stuff he has for Breech Clouts" to Major Adam Stephen in Winchester. As Bouquet suggested, Washington ordered Stephen "to make the dress of the Officers and soldiers of Major Lewis' Company a guide to come at my meaning; that all may, even in this trim, have some regard for uniformity."
In spite of his troops' appearance, Washington believed the best of his white woodsmen could not equal any Indian in woods. It was a fear that Christian Frederick Post, a diplomat to the Indians, confirmed when he and two British Indian allies, Isaac Still and Pesquitomen, stumbled on "three men, in Indian dress" on Loyalhanna Creek. Post's party mistook the whites for enemy Indians, and "preparation was made on both sides for defence. Isaac Still shewed a white token, and Pesquimeton gave an Indian halloo; after which [the white men] threw down their bundles [that contained all their food] and ran away as fast as they could."
The propaganda value of Washington's substitute Indians was priceless, however. According to James Smith, who was an adopted member of the Caunawagha tribe in Ohio, Indians returning from the defense of Fort Duquesne brought alarming news. In a skirmish at Fort Ligonier on Loyalhanna Creek, there was "a great number of American riflemen along with the redcoats, who scattered out, took trees, and were good marks-men." When the French tried to rally the braves for another fight "the Indians said if it was only the redcoats they had to do with, they could soon subdue them, but they could not withstand Ashalecoa, the Great knife, which was the name they gave the Virginians."
In the fall of 1764 Henry Bouquet invited the Virginians back to the Ohio country to take part in his expedition to recover captives, which offered some an opportunity to find lost kinfolk. Andrew Lewis put out a call to frontier stations in Augusta County for a company of volunteers to go with Captain Charles Lewis, the best Indian fighter of all the Lewis brothers, and the only one born in America, not Ireland. The Great Knives again impressed Bouquet and native adversaries alike with "their light dress, and activity ..."
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| A short hunting shirt from the Revolutionary era. According to Joseph Doddridge of western Pennsylvania, some hunting shirts were so short the belt that held the bosom together also supported strings for Indian leggings and a breech clout, "leaving the upper part of the thighs and part of the hips naked." This warm weather shirt is made of white linen. In cooler weather hunting shirts were made of more substantial cloth and almost reached to the knees. |
The captives Bouquet returned to their families added impetus to the growing popularity of Indian dress. In 1764 nine-year-old Archibald Hamilton, a prisoner for two years, threw off all his civilized clothes from "the King's store" at Fort Pitt except "enough to make a breech clout. He had been an indian so long" his family identified him only because a neighbor, "taken [prisoner] while digging ginseng on the Mountains near [Kerr's] Creek, knew [Archibald] when he got out there, and was bro't into Pittsburgh at the same time." Mary and William Ingles also experienced "considerable difficulty" persuading their son Thomas to change his Indian clothes after he returned to Ingles' Ferry in 1768, "an entire Indian in his manner and appearance." They must have been as anxious as Rebecca Linn near Stoddart's Fort in Maryland when her son Isaac "put on his Indian dress and took his gun ... afraid he was going to go off to the Indians again, but he only went to hunt."
In 1763 former captive James Smith turned his Indian training to advantage when neighbors in the Conococheague Valley hired him to recruit a company of riflemen to patrol the frontier. Two of his officers were "active young men" who had also been captives, and they dressed their men "uniformly in the Indian manner, with breech-clouts, leggins, mockesons and green strouds, which we wore in the same manner that Indians do, and nearly as Highlanders wear their plaids. In place of hats we wore red handkerchiefs, and painted our faces red and black, like Indian warriors."
Washington's propaganda success on Forbes' campaign was probably behind his recommendation that the Continental army wear "Indian or Hunting Shirts" like Pennsylvania and Virginia riflemen. He was confident the disguise would deceive the redcoats into believing they faced an army of backwoods snipers whom they dubbed "shirttail men," and their "twisted" guns "widow-and-orphan-makers." The hunting shirt, Washington said, "is a dress justly supposed to carry no small terror to the enemy, who think every such person a complete Marksman." According to John Joseph Henry, the British were so impressed with the riflemen they sent a captured specimen—George Merchant of Donegal Township in Pennsylvania, "hunting shirt and all"—to England.
It's certain that before the Revolution the hunting shirt was unknown to New Englanders. According to Henry, a "principle distinction" between New England troops and Pennsylvania and Virginia riflemen on the march to Quebec "was in our ... dress." Furthermore, in 1776 it was necessary for Washington to send a hunting shirt around with patterns for New England tailors and seamstresses to copy. After the war the hunting shirt had all but faded from the memory of New England Yankees, but remained standard equipment west of the mountains where backwoodsmen had immigrated from Pennsylvania and from the southern valleys and foothills.
In 1793, near Greenfield Station, north of Cumberland River in Tennessee, militiaman William Hall from Surry County, N.C.—whose grandfather, John Doak, was from Chester County, Pa.—wrapped his hunting shirt around beautiful, seventeen-year-old Betsy Steele just before she died of stab wounds inflicted by Indians who not only wrenched off her scalp of "long black hair," but cut off "a large portion of her dress." And in 1812 local militia on the Tennessee River assembled to salute General Thomas Johnson of Robertson County on his return from a fifteen-day scout after some marauding Creek Indians, "but lo! when he came, there was nothing ... to distinguish the general from the citizen soldiery under his command. A hunting shirt, and a cup hanging at his side, was the simple garb in which he appeared. Thus attired, the troop ... were unable to distinguish the general [whose father was from Lancaster County, Pa.] from the others."
