SOTHA HICKMAN

Sotha Hickman was a famous frontiersman and Indian fighter who was among the first white men to settle Clarksburg, Western Virginia in 1785.  Sotha was born on the Sugar Land Bottom on the Potomac River near the present town of Rockville, Maryland, in 1749. He, with a party of four others, came to the West Fork River region looking for land in the fall of 1771 and built his first cabin near where the Elk View Cemetery is now situated. He brought his family from the East to Harrison County in 1779. He entered a claim to a thousand acres of land on Elk Creek near, and perhaps including, Quiet Dell in 1773. Sotha Hickman always claimed that his son, Arthur, was the first white child born in Harrison County, that he raised the first crop of corn in the county, and that he owned the first rooster that ever crowed in the county. While trapping on the Little Kanawha River in company with Levi Douglass they were captured by a party of Indians and taken to their towns on the Scioto River in Ohio. One night while the Indians were holding a grand dance and festival the prisoners were left in charge of an old man who fell into a sleep. They each then quietly seized a gun and equipment and struck out for home and liberty. Traveling only at night, they were four days without food, and after reaching the Virginia side of the Ohio River, they were fortunate enough to kill a bear and ate so much of it that they became sick and were relieved by drinking what was called rock oil which was found floating on the surface of the Hughes River. Hickman enlisted at Nutter Fort in the Virginia troops and served fourteen months during the Indian wars, a part of the time under Colonel William Lowther.

In common with most frontiersman of the time, he had a distaste for the Indian race and his favorite expression was “Dod blast their yaller hides.”  He was known for his companionable disposition and being an expert hunter and trapper, and spent most of his time in those occupations during the fall and winter.

Hickman died in 1831 and is buried in the Haymond Cemetery at Quiet Dell in Harrison County, West Virginia.   A monument in front of the Harrison County Courthouse memorializes his as an “Indian Fighter” and his grave at Quiet Dell has been marked by the SAR as a Colonial Patriot.

For more information in Sotha Hickman, visit Genealogy Trails

Source:  "History of Harrison County" by Dorothy Davis.

Source:  Addie Hickman Research

By: Reed and Reagan