Scalped!

Mar 30, 2024

Scalped!

As a boy growing up in rural West Tennessee, I occasionally heard stories from my older relatives that someone in my family had at one time been scalped. Just who this person was I really had no idea and I wasn’t sure if it was someone in my direct ancestry or someone related to someone who was. All I really knew is that it was someone on my paternal grandmother’s side of the family. Some of my uncles and aunts seemed to think it was “grandma,” and they told how she wore silk kerchiefs on her head ever afterwards which made me think it was someone they had known personally. There was also a story that the unfortunate girl – in the stories I heard she was a teenager – had been out picking blackberries when a band of Indians came upon them. One of the girls was supposed to have been killed and one, the one with some connection to my family, was scalped. After she was scalped, she was supposed to have crawled into a hollow log and heard the Indian’s footsteps as they ran across the top of it.

I’m not even certain where I first heard the story, although it probably was from my great-uncle Albert, a retired school teacher who spent quite a bit of time at my grandparents and who would tell anyone who was willing to listen all kinds of stories about people he had known or heard about when he was growing up. Some of his stories were a bit far out, such as the one about old uncle somebody whose sweetheart had passed away. One night he was lying in his bed when he saw a light through the window, a light way off in the distance that looked when he first saw it like a brighter than normal star. As he watched, he saw it growing larger and larger and he realized it was coming closer and closer to his cabin. Finally the light was coming through his window and he saw that it was his beloved departed, who came through the window and sat on the side of his bed and talked to him. There were also stories about people who had fought in “The War,” meaning the Civil War, probably on the Union side since, even though he had grown up in Tennessee, his family (mine) were staunch Methodists who had also been abolitionists and supporters of the Union. (I’ve since learned that my soldier ancestors were actually Confederates although I had some distant relatives who were Unionists. I’m not sure about my great-grandfather, Joe Biggart, who had married into the family. He was only twenty when the war ended. One cousin claims he was a doctor. He may have been impressed by some of Forrest’s men as a medic. He became a doctor after the war.)

Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s someone in the family wrote and published a genealogical book on the descendants of the five sons of Alexander Carter who had left the Chester, South Carolina area and settled in Carroll County, Tennessee in the late 1820s and 1830s. Since it is a genealogical study of sorts, it didn’t go into great lengths on history other than the typical so and so married so and so and had so many children who married so and so and repeated the cycle. The main thing I got out of it was that I was related to about half of the kids I had gone to high school with, including some I’d just as soon not known are my relatives. There is mention of a woman named McKinney who had been scalped, but there was no real clarification as to who she was. Now that I know the story, I realize it was because she was not in the Carter line, but was actually in the ancestral line of the wife of one of the five brothers. Specifically, she was the grandmother of the wife of Jesse Humphries Carter, my great-great grandfather.

I had also heard that there was some Indian blood in my family, although I really had no idea what the relationship was or what tribe although I assumed it was one of the members of the Cherokee Nation. One of my uncles had once told his class in school that when the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower, his ancestors were there to meet them. That comment could have had a double meaning and I’m not sure which he meant because his mother’s (my grandmother) ancestry is from the Carters, who settled in Jamestown and are one of the oldest families in North America. I wasn’t even certain which side of my dad’s family the Indian blood was supposed to be from. The Carters were the only line of my ancestry I knew anything about and that only went back to the 1820s when they moved to West Tennessee. That there is Indian blood in my family was pretty apparent in the dark hair and almond-shaped eyes that are prominent in my dad’s family – and in me for that matter. When I was in Okinawa with the Air Force in the ‘60’s I was frequently asked by Okinawan girls if I was Nisei because of the shape of my eyes. As with the scalping, I had heard stories that “grandma” was an Indian.

One of the problems with tracking down the Indian blood legend was that my family really didn’t know much about my great-grandmother. She had died young, when she was only about thirty, and my great-grandfather had remarried soon afterward. I learned from my father that he had neurological issues after being hit in the head with a shovel by a dark-complected gentleman he caught stealing his coal. That wife had also died young, possibly during childbirth. She’s buried along with her son in the cemetery behind the church her husband had come to West Tennessee to pastor in the early 1900s. All I really knew about my actual great-grandmother was that she had died when my grandfather was a boy, and that she was buried in a cemetery somewhere around Bruceton, Tennessee. There is a picture of her that shows a dark-haired young woman whose features indicate that she very likely was of Native American ancestry.

The Native American ancestry issue was finally solved through a stroke of luck. Although no one in my family was looking for them, some distant relatives of my long-deceased great-grandmother were looking for us. A letter in the Carroll County newspaper from a woman in Middle Tennessee that she was looking for members of the McGowan family brought us in contact with the Johnsons, which was my great-grandmother’s maiden name. It turned out that she was actually at least half-Cherokee. Her mother, my great-great grandmother, had been raised in the Great Smoky Mountains east of Chattanooga then had moved to Middle Tennessee northeast of Nashville when my great-grandmother was a child. Like other Cherokee who remained behind in the Tennessee/North Carolina/Georgia Smoky Mountains instead of moving to Oklahoma along the “Trail of Tears”, her family hid their ancestry and referred to themselves as “Black Dutch.” My great-great-great grandparents even went to the extinct of adopting Germanic names to hide their true identity as members of the Cherokee Nation. This was evidently a common practice among the Cherokee who refused to leave their native land and move west to the Indian Nation in Oklahoma. My great-great grandmother was born in 1824 and was a young teenager when the Cherokee were rounded up and moved west. Just how she and her family came to remain behind is not clear, but they possibly had decided to become members of white society and accept United States and state law rather than Cherokee law. They may or may not have been part of the Cherokee who are now recognized as the Eastern Band. If they were, they left the tribe at some point and moved west to Middle Tennessee. Yet although they weren’t part of the relocation, the Cherokee who elected to join white society were well aware of their relatives’ plight so she was no doubt traumatized by the knowledge of how her fellow Cherokee were being treated.

The focus on the Cherokee is placed on those who refused to accept US and state law and were subsequently part of the move to Oklahoma, but those who remained behind in the Smoky Mountains weren’t much better off. Although they had become American citizens, they were in many cases feared and even hated by their white neighbors, some of whose family members had been victims of Cherokee hostility less than a century before. Tales of Indian raids on farms and villages and scalping were told around fireplaces and woodstoves at night and even though the hostilities had long since ceased and the Cherokee had largely adopted European ways, they were still looked on with fear by many of the whites in the region. To hide their identity, many Cherokee chose to conceal their identity and adopt European names.

While my grandfather’s family was avoiding deportation to Oklahoma in East Tennessee and North Georgia, my grandmother’s family had moved west from Chester County, South Carolina to settle on land that had recently been purchased from the Chickasaw in what is known as The Jackson Purchase. Future US President Andrew Jackson was a principle negotiator in the purchase from the Chickasaw of their lands lying between the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers and south of the Ohio. My ancestors moved into the region starting in 1826, some eight years after Jackson and Issac Shelby engineered the purchase of the land from the Chickasaw. They moved there at about the same time as the legendary David O. “Davy” Crockett, whose homestead was about thirty miles north and further down the winding Obion River. They left land that had been the frontier in the mid-1700s for a new frontier in former Chickasaw land west of the Tennessee.

While my ancestors were definitely pioneers when they moved west from South Carolina to West Tennessee, I had my doubts that the scalping episode had taken place after the move. Although the Chickasaw continued to hunt in West Tennessee until the tribe relocated to Oklahoma, there was little hostility between them and the white settlers. It was not clear exactly what the family relationship was to the woman who had been scalped. Although I had heard references to “grandma” by my aunts and uncles, I wasn’t sure exactly what the term meant. Although the Chickasaw had their problems with the early Europeans who came into their territory, specifically with Hernando De Soto’s party when they tried to make off with about four hundred of the tribe’s youngest and most comely women in 1540, they were allies of the United States and there were no incidents of hostility between the Chickasaw and the whites who moved into the region. Nevertheless, a common belief developed that the scalping had taken place in the region. When I paid a visit to the tiny Carroll County Museum in McLemoresville, Tennessee the curator told me that the scalping had taken place between there and Trezevant, the next community to the northwest (and where I had attended high school.) The woman, who is a McKinney by marriage, said the scalping took place on a creek between McLey, as we called the little village, and Trezevant but did not specify exactly where it was. In reality, the scalping was nowhere near Carroll County – it wasn’t even in Tennessee. The account in the Carter Family book had mentioned that the woman who was scalped was Barbara McKinney. I knew there was some connection between the Carters and the McKinneys, but didn’t know exactly what it was. As it turns out, there were multiple connections between the two families and they had, in fact, come to West Tennessee together.

Had it not been for some quirky turns of fate, I most likely would have gone to my grave never knowing the real story of the scalping, and that the woman who was scalped is in my direct family line, for what that is worth. Genealogy is a rather convoluted subject, in that the further back one goes in their family history, the more direct ancestors they have. In fact, at about the twentieth generation a person may have no less than one million direct ancestors, without allowing for intermarriage between families that are related! As it turned out, my first cousin’s son took a job in the vicinity of Chester, South Carolina and at the same time developed an interest in his family heritage. He knew that his mother’s grandmother’s family had come to Tennessee from that region. It turned out that the scalping had taken place in the vicinity of Chester and the incident is actually quite well known, not only around Chester but in the annals of early American history.

The woman who was scalped was Barbara Culp McKinney, and it was her granddaughter Betsy who moved to West Tennessee in the late 1820s. Barbara was of German ancestry – I had no idea I had German ancestry until I found information about her and her family – whose father had come to America and initially settled in Pennsylvania in 1729. Hans Casper Culp, originally Kolb in German, was an Anabaptist who left Germany and went to Holland to avoid persecution and then migrated to Colonial America. As German Baptists, or Dunkers, the Culp’s originally settled just west of Philadelphia and Barbara was born there in 1733. The family later migrated south to Virginia for a time before proceeding on down The Great Wagon Road into South Carolina, where the state was offering free land to settlers in order to establish a buffer zone between the affluent plantations around Charleston and the western frontier.[1] Their migration was typical of European families who first settled in Pennsylvania, then moved south to western Virginia in search of new land. The family of the legendary Daniel Boone made the same move south, to eventually settle along North Carolina’s Yadkin River. Sometime after the family moved to South Carolina, Barbara met William McKinney, a young man whose Scottish father had come south from Virginia driving horses.[2] By 1761 they had been married long enough to have two young children and a third was on the way.

In 1760 western South Carolina was still very much the frontier. The Cherokee Nation lay just to the west in the Great Smoky Mountains and beyond. Prior to 1759 the Cherokee had been allied with the British against the French but increasing hostility against white settlers encroaching on their territory led to a declaration of war against the British. Young Cherokee warriors began raiding white settlements in an attempt to drive them away. By 1761 the Cherokee had been generally defeated, although it would be another year before they signed a formal peace treaty with South Carolina. In the summer of 1761 a hunting party of Cherokee made up of about sixteen men and some women came into the area around Fishing Creek northeast of Chester a few miles upstream from the Catawba River and set up a camp not far from the McKinney farm. There they remained for several weeks. In August William McKinney, who was involved in a number of activities including some legal work, had to leave home and go to Camden on business, leaving Barbara and their children alone. Contrary to the assertion that she was a teenager, she was actually a married woman of 28.[3]

One day Barbara looked out and saw the Cherokee women running toward her house with the men behind. The women grabbed Barbara and the children and forced them into the house, then blocked the door and would not let the men in. Although the men were trying to force their way into the house, the women protected Barbara and the children until a chief arrived and drove the hostile braves away.[4] Fearing that the men intended to kill her, Barbara went to some neighbors and pled with them to return and stay with her until her husband’s return. Two or possibly four men, some women and children came to her house to stay with her. One of the women, Sarah Ferguson, was accompanied by her two sons and a daughter, who was also named Sarah, but no age is given for them. At least one of the sons was evidently a teenager or possibly in his early twenties. All told, there were five guns in the home. The next morning Barbara left the safety of the house and went out to the barn to do her morning milking. Ordinarily she took the children with her to the barn, but since there were people in the house, she left them there. Some of the Cherokee were evidently keeping watch on the house because, while she was milking, several leaped up and seized her. The braves had apparently crawled on their bellies so they could not be seen from the house as they got into position to capture her.

After they seized Barbara, who promised to be quiet, the renegade Cherokee men ran toward the house, dragging her along by an arm. According to some accounts, she later related that after she was captured, all fear left her and her concern was to protect the people in the house, which included her children. She deliberately stayed as far from her captor as possible so as to give the people inside the house a clear shot. As they neared the house, one of the occupants, a young man named Michael Melbury, shot and wounded the man who was holding Barbara. With her captor wounded, she was able to break free and ran toward the house. As she approached the door young John Ferguson opened it, and thus presented himself as a target for the Cherokee, who shot him dead on the spot. His mother ran to his aid and was shot in the thigh, suffering a wound that claimed her own life within a few days. Sarah Ferguson, the daughter of the wounded woman, loaded the rifles and handed them to Michael Melbury, who had taken a position in the loft after dragging John’s body away from the door and barring it. Robert Brown and his wife Joanna were out of the house when the Indians attacked and took refuge in an outbuilding. They had no rifle or musket, but found a sword lying on the floor of the building. The Indians were using the outhouse to conceal themselves from Melbury’s fire and at one point one of the men leaned against the side of the building. Joanna Brown urged her husband to take the sword and run it through the openings between the boards, but he refused saying that he was going to die, and he didn’t want to meet his maker with the blood of another human being on his hands. Mrs. Brown was not so charitable, and later admonished her husband for not killing the man.

After failing to get inside the door, Barbara McKinney was again captured, but she tried to help her friends inside by knocking the primers out of the Cherokees’ rifles. Melbury’s accurate fire was taking its toll on the attackers, although they attempted to remain concealed behind the outhouse where the Browns were hiding and behind trees. After most of them were wounded, they began retreating but carried the unfortunate woman with them. Fearing the life of a captive of the Cherokee, who at the time were still somewhat feared in the Carolinas, she refused to go quietly and had to be dragged. After they had gone about half a mile, the Cherokee became irritated with their captive and whacked her on the head with a tomahawk, a blow that left her senseless. It was evidently the second time she was struck, because she also received a wound to her back.

The whack on her head was the last thing Barbara remembered until she woke up some time later to find herself stripped naked and laying on a rock. At some point she discovered that her scalp was gone. Whether or not she had also been raped is not revealed in any of the published or family accounts of her ordeal, but it is likely that she had been. She was six months pregnant at the time and would give birth to a girl they named Hannah three months later. When she was able to raise her head, she saw the Indians in a nearby cornfield pulling ears to roast. Fearing that they would come back and finish her off, she laid her head back down and pretended to be dead. Sometime later when she satisfied herself that her tormenters had left, she began crawling toward the house and eventually reached its safety. She was found to have a multitude of wounds, including a deep one on her back that had penetrated and evidently reached her womb. An account of her ordeal written by her grandson many years later recorded that when her daughter was born, the baby bore evidence of the tomahawk blade on the side of her head.

Although she had reached the safety of the house, the situation inside was tragic. Barbara McKinney had been badly wounded and scalped but the Ferguson’s had fared even worse. Young John Ferguson lay dead and his mother suffered from a mortal wound. After their attackers retreated, the Browns left the shelter of the outbuilding and ran to the house. Michael Melbury took a rifle and left the farm to find help. He made his way, probably by canoe, to Taylors Fort at Lansford looking for assistance. A party was organized to go after the renegades but did not leave until the following morning. When they got to the shoals where the Indians had been camping they discovered that they were gone. The pursuers tracked the Cherokee a few miles to the Broad River, and saw them on the other side. At that point the pursuing party either lost their courage or were unwilling to expose themselves in the river. They let the marauders go, at least for the time being. As it turned out, the raiding party had attacked another farm a few miles from the McKinney place and killed the owner, John McDaniel, and his wife, then carried their seven children away as captives. Another party led by Thomas Steele, a trader who was familiar with the Cherokee, went out in search of the band who had attacked the McKinney and McDaniel places and tracked them almost to the Cherokee Nation, where they came upon the party. They attacked in the dead of night and killed most of the Indians and rescued the seven captives. A man named Thomas Garrett shot and killed one of the Cherokee, who turned out to have evidently been the one who scalped Barbara McKinney since her scalp was found in his shot bag.[5]

William McKinney was not aware of the tragedy but had dreams for two nights in which he dreamed that he had lost his hat. He took the dreams as a bad omen and instead of continuing on to the town of Camden as he had planned, he turned around and headed back toward his farm. A terrible sight awaited him when he reached his house. John Ferguson’s body was still lying just inside the front door and Sarah Ferguson lay dying. He found his own wife more dead than alive, mangled beyond recognition, with blood oozing from her wounds and soaking the pillow on which she lay. Barbara McKinney never would completely recover from the wounds. Blood would occasionally come out of her scalp along with tiny pieces of bone for the rest of her life. She wore silk handkerchiefs on her head to conceal her wound. Miraculously, the baby she was carrying was born without incident and she went on to bear more children. The story of the scalping of Barbara Culp McKinney spread through the Carolinas and became part of frontier history. She and her family remained in Chester County for the rest of her life. The actual date of her death is unknown, but she lived until at least 1782 when she was named as executor in her husband’s will. William’s death is reported as April 27, 1785. She and her husband were buried side-by-side in unmarked graves in the cemetery at Burnt Meeting House.

It is through William and Barbara McKinney’s youngest son Jesse that I am connected to them. Thanks to their tradition of baptizing for the dead, the Mormon Church has compiled a massive genealogical collection, including the lineage of Hans Casper Culp all the way down through my great-grandfather. John McKinney’s daughter Betsy, Barbara’s granddaughter, married Jessie Humphries Carter in Chester in 1824 and moved with him to West Tennessee soon afterwards. Their daughter Margaret, Barbara’s great-granddaughter, married my great-grandfather. So, as it turned out, Barbara Culp McKinney, the woman who was scalped, is my direct ancestor – along with some thirty-one other women of her generation, assuming there was no intermarriage between any of my ancestors.

It’s difficult to say just what the knowledge of my Cherokee ancestry and the scalping of my ancestor mean to me. As a boy growing up I was far more interested in cowboys than I was in Indians. We occasionally found arrow heads in the cotton patch and my dad once took me to a field on an adjoining farm where they had once been an Indian campground; there is no way of knowing if they were Chickasaw or some other tribe since that region was used mainly as a hunting ground. I knew very little about my ancestry and I don’t think my family did either due to my great-grandfather’s faulty memory. I had heard stories of another “Grandma” who carried a pistol in her petticoats and once drew down on a Confederate or Unionist raider who came to carry her young husband off to war. I thought all along she lived at the old Carter House I passed going back and forth to school in Trezevant, and where my grandmother’s bachelor cousins lived. It turns out the pistol-toting grandma was actually my Cherokee great-great grandma and the incident took place somewhere south of Chattanooga where the family lived for a time before moving west to Red Boiling Springs, a community on the Kentucky border northeast of Nashville where my great-grandparents met. All I can really say is it’s all interesting.

Tennessee Flyboy

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