Samuel Dale was born in 1772 in Rockbridge County, Virginia, United States. His parents, of Scotch-Irish descent, were natives of Pennsylvania, but came to the Virginia frontier soon after their marriage. They kept to the border during all of Samuel’s boyhood, moving always as it moved, once in 1775 and in 1783, when they settled in Greene County, Georgia, United States. They both died in December 1792, leaving Samuel with the responsibility of their eight younger children.
Having the fixed outlook of a frontiersman, Dale became a government scout in 1793 and served in that capacity till his company was disbanded in 1796.
He then became a trader between Savannah and the border settlements to the west, and in 1808, having acquired some land by state lottery, he set up a mill. These activities were remunerative but not exciting, and he soon abandoned them for the business of guiding immigrants through the Indian lands to Mississippi.
He was present in October 1812 when Tecumseh, at the instigation of British agents in Detroit, came to Alabama to enlist the Indians against the Americans. During the hostilities which followed, Dale was engaged in countless stirring adventures with the Indians—now friendly, now hostile. Some of these occurred in December 1814, while he was carrying important dispatches from Georgia to Andrew Jackson in New Orleans, a feat accomplished in the phenomenally short time of eight days.
He was elected in 1817 to the first General Assembly of Alabama, and he continued in that body with fair regularity till 1829. His position as legislator and distinguished veteran accounted for his appointment as one of five men to receive Lafayette when he visited Alabama in 1821.
Ten years later he was charged with the duty of transporting the expelled Choctaw Indians to the territories which had been assigned to them west of the Mississippi. An accidental injury sustained during the early days of the pilgrimage prevented his going the full distance.
He remained in Lauderdale County, and soon, as the first representative of that county, began anew his career as legislator.
Some time after the Choctaw expedition he visited Washington, D. C. , seeking compensation for corn and other supplies furnished the troops.
Alabama had been pleased to name a county for him and to create him brigadier-general of militia.
It seemed reasonable to hope that Washington would give him recognition also—less glittering, perhaps, but more substantial.
It was a vain hope. Many prominent men were cordial to him, but the third auditor, ” to whom his claim was finally referred, proved, as Dale said, ‘‘impracticable. . I would rather encounter half a dozen Indians . .. he worried me much and I left the matter unsettled” .
