Boone, The Wanderer
What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning from
Braddock's disastrous campaign in 1755 we may only conjecture. Perhaps
he was planning a career of soldiering, for in later years he was to
distinguish himself as a frontier commander in both defense and attack.
Or it may be that his heart was full of the wondrous tales told him by
the trader, John Findlay, of that Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where
buffalo and deer roamed in thousands. Perhaps he meant to set out ere
long in search of the great adventure of his dreams, despite the
terrible dangers of trail making across the zones of war into the
unknown.
However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of these
possible plans on his return to the Yadkin but halted for a different
adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from his threshold, was
offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazards to the daring. He was
twenty-two, strong and comely and a whole man; and therefore he was in
no mind to refuse what life held out to him in the person of Rebecca
Bryan. Rebecca was the daughter of Joseph Bryan, who had come to the
Yadkin from Pennsylvania some time before the Boones; and she was in her
seventeenth year.
Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours have
endeavored to supply, from the saccharine stores of their fancy, the
romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which history has
omitted to record. Hence the tale that the young hunter, walking abroad
in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's large dark eyes shining
in the dusk of the forest, mistook them for a deer's eyes and shot--his
aim on this occasion fortunately being bad! But if Boone's rifle was
missing its mark at ten paces, Cupid's dart was speeding home. So runs
the story concocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorant
alike of game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of a man with
a maid in a primitive world.
Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. Squire Boone, in
his capacity as justice of the peace, tied the knot; and in a smallcabin
built upon his spacious lands the young couple set up housekeeping. Here
Daniel's first two sons were born. In the third year of his marriage,
when the second child was a babe in arms, Daniel removed with his wife
and their young and precious family to Culpeper County in eastern
Virginia, for the border was going through its darkest days of the
French and Indian War. During the next two or three years we find him in
Virginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season; but back on
the border with his rifle, after the harvest, aiding in defense against
the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his father a lot on Sugar Tree
Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (Davie County, North Carolina)
and built thereon a cabin for himself. The date when he brought his wife
and children to live in their new abode on the border is not recorded.
It was probably some time after the close of the Indian War. Of Boone
himself during these years we have but scant information. We hear of him
again in Virginia and also as a member of the pack-horse caravan which
brought into the Back Country the various necessaries for the settlers.
We know, too, that in the fall of 1760 he was on a lone hunting trip in
the mountains west of the Yadkin; for until a few years ago there might
be seen, still standing on the banks of Boone's Creek (a small tributary
of the Watauga) in eastern Tennessee, a tree bearing the legend, "D Boon
cilled A BAR on this tree 1760." Boone was always fond of carving his
exploits on trees, and his wanderings have been traced largely by his
arboreal publications. In the next year (1761) he went with Waddell's
rangers when they marched with the army to the final subjugation of the
Cherokee.
That Boone and his family were back on the border in the new cabin
shortly after the end of the war, we gather from the fact that in 1764
he took his little son James, aged seven, on one of his long hunting
excursions. From this time dates the intimate comradeship of father and
son through all the perils of the wilderness, a comradeship to come to
its tragic end ten years later when, as we shall see, the
seventeen-year-old lad fell under the red man's tomahawk as his father
was leading the first settlers towards Kentucky. In the cold nights of
the open camp, as Daniel and James lay under the frosty stars, the
father kept the boy warm snuggled to his breast under the broad flap of
his hunting shirt. Sometimes the two were away from home for months
together, and Daniel declared little James to be as good a woodsman as
his father.
Meanwhile fascinating accounts of the new land of Florida, ceded to
Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, had leaked into the Back
Country; and in the winter of 1765 Boone set off southward on horseback
with seven companions. Colonel James Grant, with whose army Boone had
fought in 1761, had been appointed Governor of the new colony and was
offering generous inducements to settlers. The party traveled along the
borders of South Carolina and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater
part of their way over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath;
and they suffered severe hardships. Game became scarcer as they
proceeded. Once they were nigh to perishing of starvation and were saved
from that fate only through chance meeting with a band of Indians who,
seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with
them--according to the Indian code in time of peace.
Boone's party explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and
Daniel became sufficiently enamored of the tropical south to purchase
there land and a house. His wife, however, was unwilling to go to
Florida, and she was not long in convincing the hunter that he would
soon tire of a gameless country. A gameless country! Perhaps this was
the very thought which turned the wanderer's desires again towards the
land of Kentucky. ¹ The silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee
camps had opened the border forests once more to the nomadic rifleman.
Boone was not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His
brother-in-law, John Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin
Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker and James
Ward, in 1766 crossed the Appalachian Mountains, probably by stumbling
upon the Indian trail winding from base to summit and from peak to base
again over this part of the great hill barrier. They eventually reached
the Mississippi River and, having taken a good quantity of peltry on the
way, they launched upon the stream and came in time to New Orleans,
where they made a satisfactory trade of their furs.
¹ Kentucky, from Ken-ta-ke, an Iroquois word meaning "the place of old
fields." Adair calls the territory "the old fields." The Indians
apparently used the word "old," as we do, in a sense of endearment and
possession as well as relative to age.
Boone was fired anew by descriptions of this successful feat, in which
two of his kinsmen had participated. He could no longer be held back. He
must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into
Kentucky--Kentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo and deer
were as "ten thousand thousand cattle feeding" in the wilds, and where
the balmy air vibrated with the music of innumerable wings.
Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the
delectable country in the company of his friend, William Hill, who had
been with him in Florida. Autumn was the season of departure on all
forest excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been
gathered in and the day of the deer had come. By hunting, the explorers
must feed themselves on their travels and with deerskins and furs they
must on their return recompense those who had supplied their outfit.
Boone, the incessant but not always lucky wanderer, was in these years
ever in debt for an outfit.
Boone and Hill made their way over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies
and crossed the Holston and Clinch rivers. Then they came upon the west
fork of the Big Sandy and, believing that it would lead them to the
Ohio, they continued for at least a hundred miles to the westward. Here
they found a buffalo trace, one of the many beaten out by the herds in
their passage to the salt springs, and they followed it into what is now
Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie land
described by Findlay; it was rough and hilly and so overgrown with
laurel as to be almost impenetrable. They therefore wended their way
back towards the river, doubtless erected the usual hunter's camp of
skins or blankets and branches, and spent the winter in hunting and
trapping. Spring found them returning to their homes on the Yadkin with
a fair winter's haul.
Such urgent desire as Boone's, however, was not to be defeated. The next
year brought him his great opportunity. John Findlay came to the Yadkin
with a horse pack of needles and linen and peddler's wares to tempt the
slim purses of the Back Country folk. The two erstwhile comrades in arms
were overjoyed to encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the
winter of 1768-69 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay deep outside and
good-smelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an expedition
into Kentucky through the Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky
touch one another, which Findlay felt confident he could find. Findlay
had learned of this route from cross-mountain traders in 1753, when he
had descended the Ohio to the site of Louisville, whence he had gone
with some Shawanoes as a prisoner to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki
or Blue Licks. ¹
¹ Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, vol. II, pp. 215-16.
On the first day of May, 1769, Boone and Findlay, accompanied by John
Stewart and three other venturesome spirits, Joseph Holden, James
Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land. Passing
through the Cumberland Gap, they built their first camp in Kentucky on
the Red Lick fork of Station Camp Creek.
This camp was their base of operations. From it, usually in couples, we
infer, the explorers branched out to hunt and to take their observations
of the country. Here also they prepared the deer and buffalo meat for
the winter, dried or smoked the geese they shot in superabundance, made
the tallow and oil needed to keep their weapons in trim, their leather
soft, and their kits waterproof. Their first ill luck befell them in
December when Boone and Stewart were captured by a band of Shawanoes who
were returning from their autumn hunt on Green River. The Indians
compelled the two white men to show them the location of their camp,
took possession of all it contained in skins and furs and also helped
themselves to the horses. They left the explorers with just enough meat
and ammunition to provide for their journey homeward, and told them to
depart and not to intrude again on the red men's hunting grounds. Having
given this pointed warning, the Shawanoes rode on northward towards
their towns beyond the Ohio. On foot, swiftly and craftily, Boone and
his brother-in-law trailed the band for two days. They came upon the
camp in dead of night, recaptured their horses, and fled. But this was a
game in which the Indians themselves excelled, and at this date the
Shawanoes had an advantage over Boone in their thorough knowledge of the
territory; so that within forty-eight hours the white men were once more
prisoners. After they had amused themselves by making Boone caper about
with a horse bell on his neck, while they jeered at him in broken
English, "Steal horse, eh?" the Shawanoes turned north again, this time
taking the two unfortunate hunters with them. Boone and Stewart escaped,
one day on the march, by a plunge into the thick tall canebrake. Though
the Indians did not attempt to follow them through the mazes of the
cane, the situation of the two hunters, without weapons or food, was
serious enough. When they found Station Camp deserted and realized that
their four companions had given them up for dead or lost and had set off
on the trail for home, even such intrepid souls as theirs may have felt
fear. They raced on in pursuit and fortunately fell in not only with
their party but with Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, and Alexander
Neely, who had brought in fresh supplies of rifles, ammunition, flour,
and horses.
After this lucky encounter the group separated. Findlay was ill, and
Holden, Mooney, and Cooley had had their fill of Kentucky; but Squire,
Neely, Stewart, and Daniel were ready for more adventures. Daniel, too,
felt under the positive necessity of putting in another year at hunting
and trapping in order to discharge his debts and provide for his family.
Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp.
Here, in idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of Gulliver's Travels
to entertain the hunters while they dressed their deerskins or tinkered
their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the book, though with a
pronunciation all their own, they christened the nearest creek; and as
"Lulbegrud Creek" it is still known.
Before the end of the winter the two Boones were alone in the
wilderness. Their brother-in-law, Stewart, had disappeared; and Neely,
discouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the Yadkin. In May,
Squire Boone fared forth, taking with him the season's catch of beaver,
otter, and deerskins to exchange in the North Carolinian trading houses
for more supplies; and Daniel was left solitary in Kentucky.
Now followed those lonely explorations which gave Daniel Boone his
special fame above all Kentucky's pioneers. He was by no means the first
white man to enter Kentucky; and when he did enter, it was as one of a
party, under another man's guidance--if we except his former
disappointing journey into the laurel thickets of Floyd County. But
these others, barring Stewart, who fell there, turned back when they met
with loss and hardship and measured the certain risks against the
possible gains. Boone, the man of imagination, turned to wild earth as
to his kin. His genius lay in the sense of oneness he felt with his
wilderness environment. An instinct he had which these other men, as
courageous perhaps as he, did not possess.
Never in all the times when he was alone in the woods and had no other
man's safety or counsel to consider, did he suffer ill fortune. The
nearest approach to trouble that befell him when alone occurred one day
during this summer when some Indians emerged from their green shelter
and found him, off guard for the moment, standing on a cliff gazing with
rapture over the vast rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently
cut off from escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing
without haste to take him, meanwhile greeting him with mock amity. Over
the cliff leaped Boone and into the outspread arms of a friendly maple,
whose top bloomed green about sixty feet below the cliff's rim, and left
his would-be captors on the height above, grunting their amazement.
During this summer Boone journeyed through the valleys of the Kentucky
and the Licking. He followed the buffalo traces to the two Blue Licks
and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt earth, a darkly ruddy
moving mass of beasts whose numbers could not be counted. For many miles
he wound along the Ohio, as far as the Falls. He also found the Big Bone
Lick with its mammoth fossils.
In July, 1770, Daniel returned to the Red River camp and there met
Squire Boone with another pack of supplies. The two brothers continued
their hunting and exploration together for some months, chiefly in
Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's name. In that
winter they even braved the Green River ground, whence had come the
hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's first fruits a year before. In
the same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin
another party of hunters, called, from their lengthy sojourn in the
twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker,
afterwards related how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing
sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself
stole silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the
strange noises came, and descried Daniel Boone prone on his back with a
deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat beside him and his mouth
opened wide in joyous but apparently none too tuneful song. This
incident gives a true character touch. It is not recorded of any of the
men who turned back that they sang alone in the wilderness.
In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing
the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear Daniel of debt
and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years.
But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gates--for in the
Cumberland Gap they were suddenly surrounded by Indians who took
everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.