Ancestor Series - Order of the Indian Wars of the United States

Ancestor Series

The Life and Times of Jesse Maxey
by Earl MacPherson

Jesse Maxey was born around 1750 probably in Goochland County, Virginia. At the time of the Revolutionary War he, being a contemporary of Daniel Boone, was also a long hunter. He lived in New River Virginia and each winter he would to down into Kentucky and shoot buck deer all winter, skin out the hides and cure them and return in the spring to New River. He made so much money at this that the third year half of the men in the town went out with him. The next year they decided to move closer to the money tree so they picked up to move to Kentucky.

On the trip the met a fast talking real estate promoter Captain Jack Donelson who told them "You folks don't want to go to Kentucky. Why Daniel Boone has been bringing so many settlers in that there is one about every ten miles or so. In addition the Indians are mean as can be and the ground is not very fertile. I have some ground down on the Cumberland River that I'll sell to you cheap, the loam is ten feet deep and the Indians are all peaceable." Well, a group of them got onto three flatboats and traveled down the Cumberland River to the area later known as Nashville, where they settled down. Now on the trip they had pulled their boats over to the bank of the river for some reason and Indians attached them. They all got back on the boats behind the barricades except for one man who didn't quite make it over the barricade. Captain Jack's fourteen-year-old daughter Rachel reached down and pulled the young man over the barricade on the boat. She later married a man named Robard, then married Andrew Jackson.

When they reached the area where they settled down they built fifteen outposts known as stations and Jesse lived at Station Camp Creek. The "peaceful" Indians overran all the stations in the first year except three of them.

In 1788 there was another big Indiana raid and Jesse took his family and his stock to Asher Station for protection. He missed a horse and went out looking for it. The Indians caught him stabbed him in the back, cut his throat and scalped him. East of the Mississippi River Indians generally took out a spot about the size of a silver dollar when they scalped a person. Then they crushed the person's skull to be sure they were dead. A white renegade named Fenton who was traveling with the Indians detected signs of life in Jesse's body and through a ruse drew the Indians away before they had a chance to crush his skull. Firing from the fort drove the Indians away and they recovered Jesse. The wound in his throat never did heal so he always wore a scarf around his neck to conceal the wound. Far from making him fearful of the redskins whenever expeditions were mounted to eradicate the Indians the old books tell me that Jesse was amount the foremost of the volunteers.

Jesse died in 1808 and is buried in Douglas cemetery three miles North of Gallatin, Tennessee.

His son, William Maxey, in 1818 with his wife Emily, eleven children, and a Negro girl left Tennessee and moved to Illinois where he freed the last slave girl. He had freed his other slaves before he moved from Tennessee.