Pioneers of the Old Southwest
By Constance Lindsay Skinner
A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground
Volume 18 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys
Textbook Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919
Copyright, 1919
by Yale University Press
Acknowledgment.
This narrative is founded largely on original sources--on the writings
and journals of pioneers and contemporary observers, such as Doddridge
and Adair, and on the public documents of the period as printed in the
Colonial Records and in the American Archives. But the author is,
nevertheless, greatly indebted to the researches of other writers, whose
works are cited in the Bibliographical Note. The author's thanks are
due, also, to Dr. Archibald Henderson, of the University of North
Carolina, for his kindness in reading the proofs of this book for
comparison with his own extended collection of unpublished manuscripts
relating to the period.
C. L. S.
April, 1919.
Contents.
Pioneers of the Old Southwest
Chapter Chapter Title Page
Preface vii
I. The Tread Of Pioneers 1
II. Folkways 31
III. The Trader 52
IV. The Passing Of The French Peril 75
V. Boone, The Wanderer 90
VI. The Fight For Kentucky 104
VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground 129
VIII. Tennessee 157
IX. King's Mountain 195
X. Sevier, The Statemaker 226
XI. Boone's Last Days 272
Bibliographical Note 287
Index 293
PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST
∴
CHAPTER I.
The Tread Of Pioneers
The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has
ascribed the dominant rôle among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest,
began their migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth
century. It is not known with certainty precisely when or where the
first immigrants of their race arrived in this country, but soon after
1680 they were to be found in several of the colonies. It was not long,
indeed, before they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia
and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities in the
New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in several counties
behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their great trek
southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on to the Yadkin
Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own race--bold
men like themselves, hungry after land--who were coming in through
Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the
"Back Country," in search of homes.
These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the shaping
of society; they had already made history. Their ostensible object in
America was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it was
secondary to a deeper purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to America
was a passion for a whole freedom. They were lusty men, shrewd and
courageous, zealous to the death for an ideal and withal so practical to
the moment in business that it soon came to be commonly reported of them
that "they kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their
hands on," though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is
current wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in Parliament and with
arms for their own form of worship and for their civil rights. They were
already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and craft of border
warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with the Irish Celts. They
had pitted and proved their strength against a wilderness; they had
reclaimed the North of Ireland from desolation. For the time, many of
them were educated men; under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church
every child was taught to read at an early age, since no person could be
admitted to the privileges of the Church who did not both understand and
approve the Presbyterian constitution and discipline. They were brought
up on the Bible and on the writings of their famous pastors, one of
whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance to the democratic doctrine
that "men are called to the magistracy by the suffrage of the people
whom they govern, and for men to assume unto themselves power is mere
tyranny and unjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and in
resisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings to
interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster had
already declared for democracy.
It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I of England and
while the English were founding Jamestown that the Scots had first
occupied Ulster; but the true origin of the Ulster Plantation lies
further back, in the reign of Henry VIII, in the days of the English
Reformation. In Henry's Irish realm the Reformation, though proclaimed
by royal authority, had never been accomplished; and Henry's more famous
daughter, Elizabeth, had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by
James, of planting colonies of Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty
in that rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a million acres,
formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of the colonists sent
thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but among them were many
English and a smaller number of Highlanders. These three peoples from
the island of Britain brought forth, through intermarriage, the Ulster
Scots.
The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an era of
persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterian religion in
Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in 1666 through its
cattle trade, by prohibiting the exportation of beef to England and
Scotland. The Navigation Acts, excluding Ireland from direct trade with
the colonies, ruined Irish commerce, while Corporation Acts and Test
Acts requiring conformity with the practices of the Church of England
bore heavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.
It was largely by refugees from religious persecution that America in
the beginning was colonized. But religious persecution was only one of
the influences which shaped the course and formed the character of the
Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they had originally been transplanted
by James to found a loyal province in the midst of the King's enemies,
they had done their work too well and had waxed too powerful for the
comfort of later monarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their
religion; but the subsequent legislative acts which successively ruined
the woolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifled
Irish commerce, pronounced non-Episcopal marriages irregular, and
instituted heavy taxation and high rentals for the land their fathers
had made productive--these were blows dealt chiefly for the political
and commercial ends of favored classes in England.
These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at the sources of
his livelihood, made the Ulster Scot perforce what he was--a zealot as a
citizen and a zealot as a merchant no less than as a Presbyterian.
Thanks to his persecutors, he made a religion of everything he undertook
and regarded his civil rights as divine rights. Thus out of persecution
emerged a type of man who was high-principled and narrow, strong and
violent, as tenacious of his own rights as he was blind often to the
rights of others, acquisitive yet self-sacrificing, but most of all
fearless, confident of his own power, determined to have and to hold.
Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland for America in
the first three decades of the eighteenth century. More than six
thousand of them are known to have entered Pennsylvania in 1729 alone,
and twenty years later they numbered one-quarter of that colony's
population. During the five years preceding the Revolutionary War more
than thirty thousand Ulstermen crossed the ocean and arrived in America
just in time and in just the right frame of mind to return King George's
compliment in kind, by helping to deprive him of his American estates, a
domain very much larger than the acres of Ulster. They fully justified
the fears of the good bishop who wrote Lord Dartmouth, Secretary for the
Colonies, that he trembled for the peace of the King's overseas realm,
since these thousands of "phanatical and hungry Republicans" had sailed
for America.
The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to the inhabitants of
the tidewater regions as the "Scotch-Irish." Those who came from the
north, lured southward by the offer of cheap lands, were called the
"Pennsylvania Irish." Both were, however, of the same race--a race twice
expatriated, first from Scotland and then from Ireland, and stripped of
all that it had won throughout more than a century of persecution. To
these exiles the Back Country of North Carolina, with its cheap and even
free tracts lying far from the seat of government, must have seemed not
only the Land of Promise but the Land of Last Chance. Here they must
strike their roots into the sod with such interlocking strength that no
cataclysm of tyranny should ever dislodge them--or they must accept the
fate dealt out to them by their former persecutors and become a tribe of
nomads and serfs. But to these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no
choice at all. They knew themselves strong men, who had made the most of
opportunity despite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their
feet along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from
Charleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a
conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which lay sleeping like
an unready sentinel at the gates of their Future.
It is maintained still by many, however often disputed, that the
Ulstermen were the first to declare for American Independence, as in the
Old Country they were the first to demand the separation of Church and
State. A Declaration of Independence is said to have been drawn up and
signed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20, 1775. ¹ However
that may be, it is certain that these Mecklenburg Protestants had
received special schooling in the doctrine of independence. They had in
their midst for eight years (1758-66) the Reverend Alexander Craighead,
a Presbyterian minister who, for his "republican doctrines" expressed in
a pamphlet, had been disowned by the Pennsylvania Synod acting on the
Governor's protest, and so persecuted in Virginia that he had at last
fled to the North Carolina Back Country. There, during the remaining
years of his life, as the sole preacher and teacher in the settlements
between the Yadkin and the Catawba rivers he found willing soil in which
to sow the seeds of Liberty.
¹ See Hoyt, The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence; and American
Archives, Fourth Series. vol. II, p. 855.
There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped to people the
Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their oath made them
fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War, have been somewhat
overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down among the transplanted
clans--who, for the most part, spoke only Gaelic for a generation and
wrote nothing--and latterly recorded by one or two of their descendants,
supplies us with all we are now able to learn of the early coming of the
Gaels to Carolina. It would seem that their first immigration to America
in small bands took place after the suppression of the Jacobite rising
in 1715--when Highlanders fled in numbers also to France--for by 1729
there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. We know, too,
that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel Johnston, Governor of North
Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shown no joy over the King's
"glorious victory of Culloden" and that "he had appointed one William
McGregor, who had been in the Rebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of
the Peace during the last Rebellion [1745] and was not himself without
suspicion of disaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed
possible that Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew's
University, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt. He
induced large numbers of Highlanders to come to America and probably
influenced the second George to moderate his treatment of the vanquished
Gaels in the Old Country and permit their emigration to the New World.
In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals were dictated by
the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered still to the tribal or
clan system, although they, too, in the majority, were Presbyterians,
with a minority of Roman Catholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch
Highlands they had occupied small holdings on the land under the sway of
their chief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood and
fealty but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Head of the
Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold enough to step forward into
that position until he had performed some deed of worth. They were
principally herders, their chief stock being the famous small black
cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with each other were cattle raids.
Only in war, however, did the Gael lay hands on his neighbor's goods.
There were no highwaymen and housebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland
mansion, cot, or barn was ever locked. Theft and the breaking of an
oath, sins against man's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no one
guilty of them could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens.
These Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply and
frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all weathers, with
no other covering from rain and snow than their plaidies. It is reported
of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading his clan to war in winter time,
that his men were divided as to the propriety of following him further
because he rolled a snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down.
"Now we despair of victory," they said, "since our leader has become so
effeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!" ¹
¹ MacLean, An Historical Account of the Settlement of Scotch Highlanders
in America.
The "King's glorious victory of Culloden" was followed by a policy of
extermination carried on by the orders and under the personal direction
of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at last restrained his son
from his orgy of blood, he offered the Gaels their lives and exile to
America on condition of their taking the full oath of allegiance. The
majority accepted his terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but
their crops and cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which
their ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The
descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the hills and
glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among the most pathetic
in history. Strong men who had met the ravage of a brutal sword without
weakening abandoned themselves to the agony of sorrow. They kissed the
walls of their houses. They flung themselves on the ground and embraced
the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken
farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to
see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes,
their pipers played the dirge for the dead.
Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered
North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the wilderness about
the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition indicates that these
hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which
overgrew the inner country stretching towards the mountains provided
excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to
have brought with them. These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible
numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years
earlier. In 1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of
Gaels to rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from
his residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some of
these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite with
others of their clan who had been for some time in that district. The
exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin cannot be ascertained,
as there were no court records and the offices of the land companies
were not then open for the sale of these remote regions. But by 1753
there were not less than four thousand Gaels in Cumberland County, where
they occupied the chief magisterial posts; and they were already
spreading over the lands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond,
Robeson, Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was as
commonly heard as English.
In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in 1776
itself they came in increasing numbers. They knew nothing of the
smoldering fire just about to break into flames in the country of their
choice, but the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin, knew that Highland arms
would soon be needed by His Majesty. He knew something of Highland
honor, too; for he would not let the Gaels proceed after their landing
until they had bound themselves by oath to support the Government of
King George. So it was that the unfortunate Highlanders found
themselves, according to their strict code of honor, forced to wield
arms against the very Americans who had received and befriended
them--and for the crowned brother of a prince whose name is execrated to
this day in Highland song and story!
They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and tradition gives us
a stirring picture of Allan's wife--the famous Flora MacDonald, who in
Scotland had protected the Young Pretender in his flight--making an
impassioned address in Gaelic to the Highland soldiers and urging them
on to die for honor's sake. When this Highland force was conquered by
the Americans, the large majority willingly bound themselves not to
fight further against the American cause and were set at liberty. Many
of them felt that, by offering their lives to the swords of the
Americans, they had canceled their obligation to King George and were
now free to draw their swords again and, this time, in accordance with
their sympathies; so they went over to the American side and fought
gallantly for independence.
Although the brave glory of this pioneer age shines so brightly on the
Lion Rampant of Caledonia, not to Scots alone does that whole glory
belong. The second largest racial stream which flowed into the Back
Country of Virginia and North Carolina was German. Most of these Germans
went down from Pennsylvania and were generally called "Pennsylvania
Dutch," an incorrect rendering of Pennsylvänische Deutsche. The upper
Shenandoah Valley was settled almost entirely by Germans. They were
members of the Lutheran, German Reformed, and Moravian churches. The
cause which sent vast numbers of this sturdy people across the ocean,
during the first years of the eighteenth century, was religious
persecution. By statute and by sword the Roman Catholic powers of
Austria sought to wipe out the Salzburg Lutherans and the Moravian
followers of John Huss. In that region of the Rhine country known in
those days as the German Palatinate, now a part of Bavaria, Protestants
were being massacred by the troops of Louis of France, then engaged in
the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) and in the zealous effort to
extirpate heretics from the soil of Europe. In 1708, by proclamation,
Good Queen Anne offered protection to the persecuted Palatines and
invited them to her dominions. Twelve thousand of them went to England,
where they were warmly received by the English. But it was no slight
task to settle twelve thousand immigrants of an alien speech in England
and enable them to become independent and self-supporting. A better
solution of their problem lay in the Western World. The Germans needed
homes and the Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They were
settled at first along the Hudson, and eventually many of them took up
lands in the fertile valley of the Mohawk.
For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants poured into
America. In Pennsylvania their influx averaged about fifteen hundred a
year, and that colony became the distributing center for the German race
in America. By 1727, Adam Müller and his little company had established
the first white settlement in the Valley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist
Heydt went south from York, Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan
Creek at or near the site of the present city of Winchester.
The life of Count Zinzendorf, called "the Apostle," one of the leaders
of the Moravian immigrants, glows like a star out of those dark and
troublous times. Of high birth and gentle nurture, he forsook whatever
of ease his station promised him and fitted himself for evangelical
work. In 1741 he visited the Wyoming Valley to bring his religion to the
Delawares and Shawanoes. He was not of those picturesque Captains of the
Lord who bore their muskets on their shoulders when they went forth to
preach. Armored only with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation,
and the sword of the spirit, his feet "shod with the preparation of the
gospel of peace," he went out into the country of these bloodthirsty
tribes and told them that he had come to them in their darkness to teach
the love of the Christ which lighteth the world. The Indians received
him suspiciously. One day while he sat in his tent writing, some
Delawares drew near to slay him and were about to strike when they saw
two deadly snakes crawl in from the opposite side of the tent, move
directly towards the Apostle, and pass harmlessly over his body.
Thereafter they regarded him as under spiritual protection. Indeed so
widespread was his good fame among the tribes that for some years all
Moravian settlements along the borders were unmolested. Painted savages
passed through on their way to war with enemy bands or to raid the
border, but for the sake of one consecrated spirit, whom they had seen
death avoid, they spared the lives and goods of his fellow believers.
When Zinzendorf departed a year later, his mantle fell on David
Zeisberger, who lived the love he taught for over fifty years and
converted many savages. Zeisberger was taken before the Governor and
army heads at Philadelphia, who had only too good reason to be
suspicious of priestly counsels in the tents of Shem: but he was able to
impress white men no less than simple savages with the nobility of the
doctrine he had learned from the Apostle.
In 1751 the Moravian Brotherhood purchased one hundred thousand acres in
North Carolina from Lord Granville. Bishop Spangenburg was commissioned
to survey this large acreage, which was situated in the present county
of Forsyth east of the Yadkin, and which is historically listed as the
Wachovia Tract. In 1753, twelve Brethren left the Moravian settlements
of Bethlehem and Nazareth, in Pennsylvania, and journeyed southward to
begin the founding of a colony on their new land. Brother Adam Grube,
one of the twelve, kept a diary of the events of this expedition. ¹
¹ This diary is printed in full in Travels in the American Colonies
edited by N. D. Mereness.
Honor to whom honor is due. We have paid it, in some measure, to the
primitive Gaels of the Highlands for their warrior strength and their
fealty, and to the enlightened Scots of Ulster for their enterprise and
for their sacrifice unto blood that free conscience and just laws might
promote the progress and safeguard the intercourse of their kind. Now
let us take up for a moment Brother Grube's Journal even as we welcome,
perhaps the more gratefully, the mild light of evening after the
flooding sun, or as our hearts, when too strongly stirred by the deeds
of men, turn for rest to the serene faith and the naïve speech of little
children.
The twelve, we learn, were under the leadership of one of their number,
Brother Gottlob. Their earliest alarms on the march were not caused, as
we might expect, by anticipations of the painted Cherokee, but by
encounters with the strenuous "Irish." One of these came and laid
himself to sleep beside the Brethren's camp fire on their first night
out, after they had sung their evening hymn and eleven had stretched
themselves on the earth for slumber, while Brother Gottlob, their
leader, hanging his hammock between two trees, ascended--not only in
spirit--a little higher than his charges, and "rested well in it."
Though the alarming Irishman did not disturb them, the Brethren's doubts
of that race continued, for Brother Grube wrote on the 14th of October:
"About four in the morning we set up our tent, going four miles beyond
Carl Isles [Carlisle, seventeen miles southwest of Harrisburg] so as not
to be too near the Irish Presbyterians. After breakfast the Brethren
shaved and then we rested under our tent.... People who were staying at
the Tavern came to see what kind of folk we were.... Br Gottlob held the
evening service and then we lay down around our cheerful fire, and Br
Gottlob in his hammock." Two other jottings give us a racial
kaleidoscope of the settlers and wayfarers of that time. On one day the
Brethren bought "some hay from a Swiss," later "some kraut from a German
which tasted very good to us"; and presently "an Englishman came by and
drank a cup of tea with us and was very grateful for it." Frequently the
little band paused while some of the Brethren went off to the farms
along the route to help "cut hay." These kindly acts were usually repaid
with gifts of food or produce.
One day while on the march they halted at a tavern and farm in
Shenandoah Valley kept by a man whose name Brother Grube wrote down as
"Severe." Since we know that Brother Grube's spelling of names other
than German requires editing, we venture to hazard a guess that the name
he attempted to set down as it sounded to him was Sevier. And we wonder
if, in his brief sojourn, he saw a lad of eight years, slim, tall, and
blond, with daring and mischievous blue eyes, and a certain curve of the
lips that threatened havoc in the hearts of both sexes when he should be
a man and reach out with swift hands and reckless will for his desires.
If he saw this lad, he beheld John Sevier, later to become one of the
most picturesque and beloved heroes of the Old Southwest.
Hardships abounded on the Brethren's journey, but faith and the
Christian's joy, which no man taketh from him, met and surmounted them.
"Three and a half miles beyond, the road forked.... We took the right
hand road but found no water for ten miles. It grew late and we had to
drive five miles into the night to find a stoppingplace." Two of the
Brethren went ahead "to seek out the road" through the darkened
wilderness. There were rough hills in the way; and, the horses being
exhausted, "Brethren had to help push." But, in due season, "Br
Nathanael held evening prayer and then we slept in the care of Jesus,"
with Brother Gottlob as usual in his hammock. Three days later the
record runs: "Toward evening we saw Jeams River, the road to it ran down
so very steep a hill that we fastened a small tree to the back of our
wagon, locked the wheels, and the Brethren held back by the tree with
all their might." Even then the wagon went down so fast that most of the
Brethren lost their footing and rolled and tumbled pell-mell. But Faith
makes little of such mishaps: "No harm was done and we thanked the Lord
that he had so graciously protected us, for it looked dangerous and we
thought at times that it could not possibly be done without accident but
we got down safely... we were all very tired and sleepy and let the
angels be our guard during the night." Rains fell in torrents, making
streams almost impassable and drenching the little band to the skin. The
hammock was empty one night, for they had to spend the dark hours
trench-digging about their tent to keep it from being washed away. Two
days later (the 10th of November) the weather cleared and "we spent most
of the day drying our blankets and mending and darning our stockings."
They also bought supplies from settlers who, as Brother Grube observed
without irony,
are glad we have to remain here so long and that it means money for
them. In the afternoon we held a little Lovefeast and rested our souls
in the loving sacrifice of Jesus, wishing for beloved Brethren in
Bethlehem and that they and we might live ever close to Him....
Nov. 16. We rose early to ford the river. The bank was so steep that we
hung a tree behind the wagon, fastening it in such a way that we could
quickly release it when the wagon reached the water. The current was
very swift and the lead horses were carried down a bit with it. The
water just missed running into the wagon but we came safely to the other
bank, which however we could not climb but had to take half the things
out of the wagon, tie ropes to the axle on which we could pull, help our
horses which were quite stiff, and so we brought our ark again to dry
land.
On the evening of the 17th of November the twelve arrived safely on
their land on the "Etkin" (Yadkin), having been six weeks on the march.
They found with joy that, as ever, the Lord had provided for them. This
time the gift was a deserted cabin, "large enough that we could all lie
down around the walls. We at once made preparation for a little
Lovefeast and rejoiced heartily with one another."
In the deserted log cabin, which, to their faith, seemed as one of those
mansions "not built with hands" and descended miraculously from the
heavens, they held their Lovefeast, while wolves padded and howled about
the walls; and in that Pentacostal hour the tongue of fire descended
upon Brother Gottlob, so that he made a new song unto the Lord. Who
shall venture to say it is not better worth preserving than many a
classic?
We hold arrival Lovefeast here
In Carolina land,
A company of Brethren true,
A little Pilgrim-Band,
Called by the Lord to be of those
Who through the whole world go,
To bear Him witness everywhere
And nought but Jesus know.
Then, we are told, the Brethren lay down to rest and "Br Gottlob hung
his hammock above our heads"--as was most fitting on this of all nights;
for is not the Poet's place always just a little nearer to the stars?
The pioneers did not always travel in groups. There were families who
set off alone. One of these now claims our attention, for there was a
lad in this family whose name and deeds were to sound like a ballad of
romance from out the dusty pages of history. This family's name was
Boone.
Neither Scots nor Germans can claim Daniel Boone; he was in blood a
blend of English and Welsh; in character wholly English. His grandfather
George Boone was born in 1666 in the hamlet of Stoak, near Exeter in
Devonshire. George Boone was a weaver by trade and a Quaker by religion.
In England in his time the Quakers were oppressed, and George Boone
therefore sought information of William Penn, his coreligionist,
regarding the colony which Penn had established in America. In 1712 he
sent his three elder children, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out the
land. Sarah and Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while their brother
returned to England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, George
Boone, his wife, and the rest of his children journeyed to Bristol and
sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on the 10th of October. The
Boones went first to Abingdon, the Quaker farmers' community. Later they
moved to the northwestern frontier hamlet of North Wales, a Welsh
community which, a few years previously, had turned Quaker. Sarah Boone
married a German named Jacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township,
Berks County. In 1718 George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley,
or, to be exact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and there he
lived in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of
seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten
great-grandchildren, seventy descendants in all--English, German, Welsh,
and Scotch-Irish blended into one family of Americans. ¹
¹ R. G. Thwaites, Daniel Boone, p. 5.
Among the Welsh Quakers was a family of Morgans. In 1720 Squire Boone
married Sarah Morgan. Ten years later he obtained 250 acres in Oley on
Owatin Creek, eight miles southeast of the present city of Reading; and
here, in 1734, Daniel Boone was born, the fourth son and sixth child of
Squire and Sarah Morgan Boone. Daniel Boone therefore was a son of the
frontier. In his childhood he became familiar with hunters and with
Indians, for even the red men came often in friendly fashion to his
grandfather's house. Squire Boone enlarged his farm by thrift. He
continued at his trade of weaving and kept five or six looms going,
making homespun cloth for the market and his neighbors.
Daniel's father owned grazing grounds several miles north of the
homestead and each season he sent his stock to the range. Sarah Boone
and her little Daniel drove the cows. From early spring till late
autumn, mother and son lived in a rustic cabin alone on the frontier. A
rude dairy house stood over a cool spring, and here Sarah Boone made her
butter and cheese. Daniel, aged ten at this time, watched the herds; at
sunset he drove them to the cabin for milking, and locked them in the
cowpens at night.
He was not allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself a
weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shaved sapling
with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert was he in the
launching of this primitive spear that he easily brought down birds and
small game. When he reached his twelfth year, his father bought him a
rifle; and he soon became a crack shot. A year later we find him setting
off on the autumn hunt--after driving the cattle in for the winter--with
all the keenness and courage of a man twice his thirteen years. His
rifle enabled him to return with meat for the family and skins to be
traded in Philadelphia. When he was fourteen his brother Sam married
Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who took a special interest in
her young brother-in-law and taught him "the rudiments of three R's."
The Boones were prosperous and happy in Oley and it may be wondered why
they left their farms and their looms, both of which were profitable,
and set their faces towards the Unknown. It is recorded that, though the
Boones were Quakers, they were of a high mettle and were not
infrequently dealt with by the Meeting. Two of Squire Boone's children
married "worldlings"--non-Quakers--and were in consequence "disowned" by
the Society. In defiance of his sect, which strove to make him sever all
connection with his unruly offspring, Squire Boone refused to shut his
doors on the son and the daughter who had scandalized local Quakerdom.
The Society of Friends thereupon expelled him. This occurred apparently
during the winter of 1748-49. In the spring of 1750 we see the whole
Boone family (save two sons) with their wives and children, their
household goods and their stock, on the great highway, bound for a land
where the hot heart and the belligerent spirit shall not be held amiss.
Southward through the Shenandoah goes the Boone caravan. The women and
children usually sit in the wagons. The men march ahead or alongside,
keeping a keen eye open for Indian or other enemy in the wild, their
rifles under arm or over the shoulder. Squire Boone, who has done with
Quakerdom and is leading all that he holds dear out to larger horizons,
is ahead of the line, as we picture him, ready to meet first whatever
danger may assail his tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small
stature, with ruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in
the line, together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded
cattle and companioned each other through long months in the cabin on
the frontier. We do not think of this woman as riding in the wagon,
though she may have done so, but prefer to picture her, with her tall
robust body, her black hair, and her black eyes--with the s udden Welsh
snap in them--walking as sturdily as any of her sons.
If Daniel be beside her, what does she see when she looks at him? A lad
well set up but not overtall for his sixteen years, perhaps--for
"eye-witnesses" differ in their estimates of Daniel Boone's height--or
possibly taller than he looks, because his figure has the forest
hunter's natural slant forward and the droop of the neck of one who must
watch his path sometimes in order to tread silently. It is Squire
Boone's blood which shows in his ruddy face--which would be fair but for
its tan--and in the English cut of feature, the straw-colored eyebrows,
and the blue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black
hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his shoulders.
We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by this plunge into the
Wild. He sees ahead--the days of his great explorations and warfare, the
discovery of Kentucky? Not at all. This is a boy of sixteen in love with
his rifle. He looks ahead to vistas of forest filled with deer and to
skies clouded with flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is
happiness enough for Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later
life, he asked little, if any more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.