XXVI

Much has been said of the first white settlers of the Nickajack such as John Hunt and John Ditto and the Criners of Hurricane Valley, who arrived in present day Madison County in the dawning years of the 19th century. They were squatters all on Cherokee lands that they anticipated would be opened up to settlement. And so they were by the Treaties of Tellico, except those Cherokee lands which overlapped Chickasaw claims along the Elk River in Limestone County. That is where, in the years before John Hunt settled on the Big Spring, that a desperate band of derelicts hove their makeshift flatboats alongside Buck Island, at the great bend of the Elk in northwest Limestone County .

 
They were eight families led by William Penn Redus, who was a lapsed Quaker, and whose relations survive widely in Limestone County still today, both black and white. Among them also was Abner Stockwell Shoney and a woman whose name is lost to history but apparently he hadn't married anyway. They formed a cult-like compact and fashioned flatboats to carry them down the Tennessee River from Knoxville past Ross's Landing and through the Tennessee Gorge. They drifted down into the Cherokee lands known as the Nickajack and, finding the mouth of a rich tributary, steered themselves up that course into the uplands of the Highland Rim.

 
They arrived at an island and tied their flatboats into a floating village. In those days great elk still roamed the Nickajack, and Abner Shoney had slain one with his long rifle as it forded the river across the island, which was thereafter named Buck Island on the river thereafter named the Elk. They made contact with their Chickasaw neighbors, who were irate that an elk had been taken on the island, which was sacred burial ground. They cursed Abner Shoney and all his progeny and would thereafter raid the squatter settlement at Buck Island during the night, rustling livestock and leaving bad omens such as skinned rabbits. The squatters survived mainly by fishing and growing crops in the Indian fashion with stalks of corn intertwined with beans and crowded with peas and squash.

 
Bitter complaints by the Chickasaw to their agent about these squatters brought federal intervention in the form of a company of soldiers from the 7th Infantry Regiment, who marched overland from the Hiwasee to construct Fort Hampton on the Elk River. They commenced to remove the Buck Island squatters from their settlement further east into undisputed Madison County in a relocation settlement called Barkville for the bark which were clasped to its shanty structures. And so they were uprooted, and they did not return until the Chickasaw did relinquish their lands sometime thereafter. Abner Shoney, however, refused to give up his claim crying that "there is just one redskin for every 10,000 acres." To avoid removal, he went native into the wilds of the upcountry, which was not even part of the United States at the time. His lady companion unsurprisingly falls off the record. He survived by shooting for birds and pelts and elk. He kept the great rack of the elk he first brought down on Buck Island and mounted it over the mantle of the dogtrot house he built near today's Leggtown.

 
As the Natchez Trace was surveyed up the northwest corner of Alabama, the Chickasaw finally decided to sell their land before it was taken from them. Limestone County was now opened up along all points west and south of the Tennessee River. When William Penn Redus and the other squatters returned to Buck Island, they found Abner Shoney had taken a Chickasaw squaw as his next companion and had survived on pemican and dried fish and bird flesh during two hard winters.

 
Abner Shoney used his old Chickasaw relations to open a trade in liquor and dry goods from a post on Buck Island, for the Chickasaw did not vacate the lands they relinquished, but had only settled on farms like white settlers had. The Chickasaw, however, did not give up their temperamental ways. When the unscrupulous Abner Shoney was caught cutting his liquor and overcharging his customers, a pair of Chickasaw braves accosted him at his post. A scuffle erupted, and Abner was pinned to the ground and scalped by the braves, who then robbed him and stole his rifle. Abner survived the scalping and carried the disfigurement the rest of the days. And so Abner Shoney eventually built up his farm starting with 20 acres at Leggtown and purchased his first slave from Nashville. There he gave birth to a one Cawthorp Shoney, a man of considerably less intrepidity as his forebear, and whose mother remained unknown or unknowable.