Early Burke County, North Carolina, according to Judge Avery

Extract from an address on the "Early History of Burke County," by Judge Alphonso Calhoun Avery (1835-1913):

During the year 1776 the Cherokee Indians as allies of England, crossed the Blue Ridge and invaded the upper part of Burke and what is now McDowell County. They scalped the people, burned the houses and appropriated the live stock along their line of march. It is to be regretted that more of the history of that fearful raid has not been preserved.
With very short notice of their danger, the people living along the foot of the Blue Ridge in McDowell and also in Burke rushed to the different forts for protection, and those who without warning, remained at their homes, were killed, after being subjected, in some instances, to cruel torture. Very few women, even, were spared and taken as prisoners.
The white men then claimed the country to the top of the Blue Ridge, and had occupied it to the foot, while the Watauga settlement west of the mountains extended South of Jonesboro for some distance. The treaty of the next year was concluded at the Long Island of Holston, and contained a formal recognition of the claims of the whites. There was a fort at the present town of Old Fort, which was built for the Catawbas, as we have mentioned, but was used in 1776 by the whites. Another had been erected in the Turkey Cove, a third where the town of Lenoir now stands, and we suppose that many others were scattered along in the exposed settlements of Burke and Tryon.
Old Mrs Hunter, the mother of James Hunter (who formerly lived on Linville where his son Joseph now lives), and grandmother of the late Swan Burnett and Mrs J. Sewell Brown of McDowell county, was scalped by the savages, who appeared at her house without warning. She was left senseless, but recovered, however, lived many years after and raised a large family.
The wife of a man named McFalls, who lived in the North or Turkey Cove, was also scalped and terribly disfigured, but recovered to find herself disowned and deserted by her unfeeling husband because her beauty had been marred by her terrible wounds. This same man McFalls was a Tory, and when captured at King's Mountain was led up to a tree with a rope around his neck, but was released at the earnest request of one of McDowell's men who promised to be responsible for his good behavior thereafter, on taking the oath of allegiance to the colonial government. The Cherokees came down Roaring Creek to Toe River and crossed, we believe, into the North Cove settlement first. Colonel Waightstill Avery passed up Roaring Creek, and hearing the war-whoop behind, spurred his horse and galloped across from the head of the creek to the Watauga settlement on Doe River. When he returned with Col. Sharp and others, who, with him, made the treaty of 1777, on Holston, he ascertained from a woman, who had been a prisoner, that several braves followed him for some distance, and desisted only because they suspected that he was trying to lead them into an ambuscade. Gen. Rutherford raised near the close of the summer of 1776 an army of 2,400 men.
He probably passed up the old Island Ford road a few miles south of Morganton. He was joined in Burke county by both Joseph McDowell, Sr., and Joseph McDowell, Jr., as well as Col. Armstrong's regiment from Wilkes and Surry. He crossed the Blue Ridge at Swannanoa Gap, went down that river to the French Broad, then, after passing up Hominy, crossed the Pigeon just below the mouth of East Fork, and entered the valley of Richland a few miles above Waynesville. He then marched up that creek, crossed Balsam to Scott's Creek, and passed down Scott's Creek to the Tuckaseegee, which he crossed at an Indian town called Stekoeh, located on the farm of Col. W. H. Thomas, in Jackson county, a mile from Whittier Station. After an engagement with the Indians on Cowee Mountains, he went down the Tennessee river to Middletown, then on the 14th of September he met Gen. Williamson, from South Carolina. He returned by the same route, afterwards known as “Rutherford's Trace,” having completely subdued the Indians and paved the way for the treaty of the next year.
Gen. Rutherford, we suppose, followed an old Indian trail, but it is curious to observe how nearly he marked out also the line on which the great highways of the country, first the turnpike and then the railroad were located.
Nearly all of the men of the Piedmont section, who afterwards led in the last campaign of 1780-'81 in Western North Carolina, saw their first service under Rutherford in this expedition.

A Prevalent Fear

From Our Savage Neighbors, by Peter Silver, published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2007, pp. 58-59:

Rather surprisingly, the right of at least eventual burial was a basic assumption of the laws of war. As the great Spanish theorist Vitoria had observed, it had been considered a clear right under natural law, even for the corpses of executed criminals, since at least the time of the Israelites: and since "piety is a natural thing, even for the dead . . . [it] is unlawful to abuse their corpses." Unlike those people today who sign up happily for posthumous donations and dissections, early Americans were very far from indifferent about what happened to their bodies after death. When blended with Indians' supposed propensity for mutilating their dead or dying opponents, this dread of posthumous abuse (especially of decaying visibly, or becoming food for animals) accounted for an enormous part of the fear that provincial Americans felt when considering Indian attacks. Their evident fascination with the burning up after death of Indians victims in flaming barns or houses probably sprang, too, from the idea of the dead's being disposed of in horribly unconventional ways.
Body-burying expeditions had a central place in newspaper reporting–a place that makes sense when we understand the special power the damaged or unburied dead had to shock and depress colonists. The parties of men who trudged off to find victims and "[Bury them] in a Christian Manner" became vessels for terror. In late October 1755, after William Parsons heard reports of an attack near Easton and went out "to assist in burying the Dead," he wrote two letters unburdening himself of the horror of the trip. His little party, doubling in numbers as it went, heard of another attack nearer by and decided "to go . . . to these dead Bodies" first, which they soon found "lying dead just in the Road" with "all the Skin of their Heads . . . scalpt off." As darkness fell, the members of the party worried that "their Bodies might be torn to pieces" before morning. So they borrowed a grubbing hoe and shovel from the nearest farm and dug the deepest grave they could in the stony ground, putting them both in one grave . . . as we found them with all their Cloaths on."

The Crawford Expedition

During the Revolutionary War, William Crawford (1732-1782) was commissioned colonel of the 7th Virginia and served with the distinction at the battles of Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, and Germantown. In late 1777, he took command of the continental troops and militia in western Pennsylvania. After the War, Crawford retired from the military, but his reputation as an Indian fighter soon made him the commander of an ill-fated expedition against the Delaware Indians of Sandusky, Ohio in the spring of 1782. Unfamiliar with the terrain and unable to replenish his troops, Crawford’s army of experienced frontiersman was defeated. Angered by the massacre of neutral and unarmed Indians in the Muskingham Valley by Pennsylvania militia, Indian warriors stripped off Crawford’s clothes, tied his arms around a thick wooden post, and tortured him. Dr. John Knight, a military surgeon who traveled with the Sandusky expedition, witnessed the atrocity:

"Seventy shots of powder were fired at his body. Indians then cut off his ears, prodded him with burning sticks, and tossed hot embers at him. Colonel Crawford continued in the extremities of pain for an hour and three quarters or two hours longer, as near as I can judge, when at last, being almost totally exhausted, he laid down on his belly; they then scalped him and repeatedly threw the scalp in my face, telling me, 'That was your great captain.' An old squaw got a board, took a parcel of coals and ashes and laid them on his back and head, after he had been scalped. Colonel Crawford then raised himself upon his feet and began to walk around the post; they next put a burning stick to him as usual, but he seemed more insensible of pain than before."

After learning of Crawford’s brutal fate on June 11, 1782, the Pennsylvania Packet reported that the state militia was “greatly enraged and determined to have ample satisfaction."

(Source: Beyond Philadelphia: The American Revolution in the Pennsylvania Hinterland, by Gregory T. Knouff, John B. Frantz ed., William Pencak ed., Park, Pa: Penn State Press, 1998)

David Hood, aka "The Possum"

From History of Middle Tennessee, by Albigence Waldo Putnam, published 1859, page 154:

In the narrative of John Rains, the account of "the said Hood," or David Hood, "the Possum," is stated thus:
"One of the most interesting incidents connected with the early history of Tennessee, is one in which a man named David Hood figured. He was coming up from 'Freclaud's Station,' below the Sulphur Spring adjoining Nashville, when several Indians [likely Chickasaws, per John Buchanan] gave chase to him, firing upon him as he ran. He, thinking there was no other chance for his life, concluded to try 'possuming it,' and so fell flat upon his face in the weeds, as if dead. The Indians ran up and gathered around him and one of them very deliberately twisted his fingers into his hair, to scalp him. His knife being very dull, he let go, took a better hold, and sawed away, until he could pull it off, poor Hood bearing it meanwhile without a groan or show of life.
"After the deed was done, they stood around a little while, reloaded their guns, and started on towards town, (or the Bluff Fort.) One of the Indians gave him a few stamps in the back as they started away. After a while, Hood raised his head cautiously, peeped out under his arms, and at last, finding the coast clear, got up and started towards town.
"Mounting the ridge above the Spring, what was his dismay to find himself once more in the presence of the whole gang! Again he started, but again they fired upon him as he ran. One of their bullets cut him deeply across the breast, but finally, after getting so close as to pull off one of the skirts of his coat, the Indians abandoned him. When quite spent, he dropped behind a log in the corn-field near by, after facing around to get one fire at them, and was rescued by some whites who came out at the sound of the firing."

From Jackson's Way, by John Buchanan, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001, pp. 65-66:

[David Hood] probably would have died had it not been for James Robertson, who could do many things: travel thousands of miles alone through perilous wilderness, establish a settlement in hostile country, treat with or fight Indians as the occasion demanded, and a myriad of things necessary for survival on a frontier. Much of what he could do was expected of a seasoned frontiersman. But few could properly treat a scalped man, which James Robertson now proceeded to do for David Hood. He had seen scalps pegged in East Tennessee, and an anonymous French surgeon had taught him how to use a shoemaker's awl to make small holes in the "outer table of the skull, pretty close together." The blood oozing out formed a protective scab under which the terrible wound healed. David Hood's scalp would never be one for a woman to run her fingers over, and as with many scalping victims who survived he may never have been the same again in mind or body, but he lived for several years.

The Kerr's Creek Massacre

From Annals of Augusta County, Virginia, from 1726 to 1871, by Joseph Addison Waddell, published 1902, C.R. Caldwell, Virginia, pp. 171-172:

The smaller band of Indians made their descent upon Kerr's creek, on the 17th of July [1763]. Their number was twenty-seven, Robert Irvin having counted them from a bluff near the road at the head of the creek. Some weeks before, two boys, named Telford, reported that when returning from school they had seen a naked man near their path. This report was not much thought of till the massacre, when it was supposed that the man seen by the boys was an Indian spy sent out to reconnoitre.
Leaving the site of old Millborough, the savages passed over Mill mountain at a low place still called the "Indian Trail." Coming on the waters of Bratton's Run, they crossed the North mountain, where it is now crossed by the road leading from Lexington to the Rockbridge Alum Springs, and where there is a large heap of stones, supposed to have been piled up by Indians. From this point they had a full view of the peaceful valley of Kerr's creek. Hastening down the mountain, they began the work of indiscriminate slaughter. Coming first to the house of Charles Daugherty, he and his whole family were murdered. They next came to the house of Jacob Cunningham, who was from home, but his wife was killed, and his daughter, about ten years of age, scalped and left for dead. She revived, was carried off as a prisoner in the second invasion, was redeemed, and lived for forty years afterwards, but finally died from the effects of the scalping. The Indians then proceeded to the house of Thomas Gilmore, and he and his wife were killed, the other members of the family escaping at that time. The house of Robert Hamilton came next. This family consisted of ten persons, and one-half of them were slain. By this time the alarm had spread through the neighborhood, and the inhabitants were flying in every direction. For some reason the main body of the Indians went no farther. Perhaps they were sated with blood and plunder; most probably they feared to remain longer with so small a band. A single Indian pursued John McKee and his wife as they were flying from their house. By the entreaty of his wife, McKee did not wait for her, and she was overtaken and killed. He escaped. His six children had been sent to the house of a friend on Timber Ridge, on account of some uneasiness, caused probably by the report about the naked man.