Daniel Boone and Wilderness Exploration
Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent; where
the horrid yells of the savages, and the groans of the distressed,
sounded in our ears, we now hear the praises and adorations of our
Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the miserable abodes of savages,
we behold the foundations of cities laid, that, in all probability, will
equal the glory of the greatest upon earth.
--Daniel Boone, 1784.
The wandering life of a border Nimrod in a surpassingly beautiful
country teeming with game was the ideal of the frontiersman of the
eighteenth century. As early as 1728, while running the dividing line
between North Carolina and Virginia, William Byrd encountered along the
North Carolina frontier the typical figure of the professional hunter:
"a famous Woodsman, call'd Epaphroditus Bainton. This Forester Spends
all his time in ranging the Woods, and is said to make great Havock
among the Deer, and other Inhabitants of the Forest, not much wilder
than himself." By the middle of the century, as he was threading his way
through the Carolina piedmont zone, the hunter's paradise of the Yadkin
and Catawba country, Bishop Spangenberg found ranging there many
hunters, living like Indians, who killed thousands of deer each year and
sold the skins in the local markets or to the fur-traders from Virginia
whose heavy pack-trains with their tinkling bells constantly traversed
the course of the Great Trading Path.
The superlative skill of one of these hunters, both as woodsman and
marksman, was proverbial along the border. The name of Daniel Boone
became synonymous with expert huntsmanship and almost uncanny wisdom in
forest lore. The bottoms of the creek near the Boone home, three miles
west of present Mocksville, contained a heavy growth of beech, which
dropped large quantities of its rich nuts or mast, greatly relished by
bears; and this creek received its name, Bear Creek, because Daniel and
his father killed in its rich bottoms ninety-nine bears in a single
hunting-season. After living for a time with his young wife, Rebecca
Bryan, in a cabin in his father's yard, Daniel built a home of his own
upon a tract of land, purchased from his father on October 12, 1759, and
lying on Sugar Tree, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek. Here he dwelt for
the next five years, with the exception of the period of his temporary
removal to Virginia during the terrible era of the Indian war. Most of
his time during the autumn and winter, when he was not engaged in
wagoning or farming, he spent in long hunting-journeys into the
mountains to the west and northwest. During the hunting-season of 1760
he struck deeper than ever before into the western mountain region and
encamped in a natural rocky shelter amidst fine hunting-grounds, in what
is now Washington County in east Tennessee. Of the scores of
inscriptions commemorative of his hunting-feats, which Boone with
pardonable pride was accustomed throughout his life-time to engrave with
his hunting-knife upon trees and rocks, the earliest known is found upon
a leaning beech tree, only recently fallen, near his camp and the creek
which since that day has borne his name. This is a characteristic and
enduring record in the history of American exploration:
D. Boon
CillED A. BAR On
Tree
in The
yEAR
1760
Late in the summer of the following year Boone marched under the command
of the noted Indian-fighter of the border, Colonel Hugh Waddell, in his
campaign against the Cherokees. From the lips of Waddell, who was
outspoken in his condemnation of Byrd's futile delays in road-cutting
and fort-building, Boone learned the true secret of success in Indian
warfare, which was lost upon Braddock, Forbes, and later St. Clair: that
the art of defeating red men was to deal them a sudden and unexpected
blow, before they had time either to learn the strength of the force
employed against them or to lay with subtle craft their artful
ambuscade.
In the late autumn of 1761, Daniel Boone and Nathaniel Gist, the son of
Washington's famous guide, who were both serving under Waddell,
temporarily detached themselves from his command and led a small party
on a "long hunt" in the Valley of the Holston. While encamping near the
site of Black's Fort, subsequently built, they were violently assailed
by a pack of fierce wolves which they had considerable difficulty in
beating off; and from this incident the locality became known as Wolf
Hills (now Abingdon, Virginia). [92]
From this time forward Boone's roving instincts had full sway. For many
months each year he threaded his way through that marvelously beautiful
country of western North Carolina felicitously described as the
Switzerland of America. Boone's love of solitude and the murmuring
forest was surely inspired by the phenomenal beauties of the country
through which he roamed at will. Blowing Rock on one arm of a great
horseshoe of mountains and Tryon Mountain upon the other arm, overlooked
an enormous, primeval bowl, studded by a thousand emerald-clad
eminences. There was the Pilot Mountain, the towering and isolated pile
which from time immemorial had served the aborigines as a guide in their
forest wanderings; there was the dizzy height of the Roan on the border;
there was Mt. Mitchell, portentous in its grandeur, the tallest peak on
the continent east of the Rockies; and there was the Grandfather, the
oldest mountain on earth according to geologists, of which it has been
written:
Oldest of all terrestrial things--still holding
Thy wrinkled forehead high;
Whose every seam, earth's history enfolding,
Grim science doth defy!
Thou caught'st the far faint ray from Sirius rising,
When through space first was hurled
The primal gloom of ancient voids surprising,
This atom, called the World!
What more gratifying to the eye of the wanderer than the luxuriant
vegetation and lavish profusion of the gorgeous flowers upon the
mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rosebay, and laurel, and the
azalea rising like flame; or the rare beauties of the water--the
cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap into the gorge, and
that romantic river poetically celebrated in the lines:
Swannanoa, nymph of beauty,
I would woo thee in my rhyme,
Wildest, brightest, loveliest river
Of our sunny Southern clime.
• • •
Gone forever from the borders
But immortal in thy name,
Are the Red Men of the forest
Be thou keeper of their fame!
Paler races dwell beside thee,
Celt and Saxon till thy lands
Wedding use unto thy beauty--
Linking over thee their hands.
The long rambling excursions which Boone made through western North
Carolina and eastern Tennessee enabled him to explore every nook and
corner of the rugged and beautiful mountain region. Among the companions
and contemporaries with whom he hunted and explored the country were his
little son James and his brother Jesse; the Linville who gave the name
to the beautiful falls; Julius Cæsar Dugger, whose rock house stood near
the head of Elk Creek; and Nathaniel Gist, who described for him the
lofty gateway to Kentucky, through which Christopher Gist had passed in
1751. Boone had already heard of this gateway, from Findlay, and it was
one of the secret and cherished ambitions of his life to scale the
mountain wall of the Appalachians and to reach that high portal of the
Cumberland which beckoned to the mysterious new Eden beyond. Although
hunting was an endless delight to Boone he was haunted in the midst of
this pleasure, as was Kipling's Explorer, by the lure of the
undiscovered:
Till a voice as bad as conscience, rang interminable changes
On one everlasting whisper day and night repeated--so:
'Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges--
'Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go.'
Of Boone's preliminary explorations for the land company known as
Richard Henderson and Company, an account has already been given; and
the delay in following them up has been touched on and in part
explained. Meanwhile Boone transferred his efforts for a time to another
field. Toward the close of the summer of 1765 a party consisting of
Major John Field, William Hill, one Slaughter, and two others, all from
Culpeper County, Virginia, visited Boone and induced him to accompany
them on the "long Journey" to Florida, whither they were attracted by
the liberal offer of Colonel James Grant, governor of the eastern
section, the Florida of to-day. On this long and arduous expedition they
suffered many hardships and endured many privations, found little game,
and on one occasion narrowly escaped starvation. They explored Florida
from St. Augustine to Pensacola; and Boone, who relished fresh scenes
and a new environment, purchased a house and lot in Pensacola in
anticipation of removal thither. But upon his return home, finding his
wife unwilling to go, Boone once more turned his eager eye toward the
West, that mysterious and alluring region beyond the great range, the
fabled paradise of Kentucky.
The following year four young men from the Yadkin, Benjamin Cutbird,
John Stewart (Boone's brother-in-law who afterwards accompanied him to
Kentucky), John Baker, and James Ward made a remarkable journey to the
westward, crossing the Appalachian mountain chain over some unknown
route, and finally reaching the Mississippi. The significance of the
journey, in its bearing upon westward expansion, inheres in the fact
that while for more than half a century the English traders from South
Carolina had been winning their way to the Mississippi along the lower
routes and Indian trails, this was the first party from either of the
Carolinas, as far as is known, that ever reached the Mississippi by
crossing the great mountain barrier. When Cutbird, a superb woodsman and
veritable Leatherstocking, narrated to Boone the story of his
adventures, it only confirmed Boone in his determination to find the
passage through the mountain chain leading to the Mesopotamia of
Kentucky.
Such an enterprise was attended by terrible dangers. During 1766 and
1767 the steady encroachments of the white settlers upon the ancestral
domain which the Indians reserved for their imperial hunting-preserve
aroused bitter feelings of resentment among the red men. Bloody reprisal
was often the sequel to such encroachment. The vast region of Tennessee
and the trans-Alleghany was a twilight zone, through which the savages
roamed at will. From time to time war parties of northern Indians, the
inveterate foes of the Cherokees, scouted through this no-man's land and
even penetrated into the western region of North Carolina, committing
murders and depredations upon the Cherokees and the whites
indiscriminately. During the summer of 1766, while Boone's friend and
close connection, Captain William Linville, his son John, and another
young man, named John Williams, were in camp some ten miles below
Linville Falls, they were unexpectedly fired upon by a hostile band of
Northern Indians, and before they had time to fire a shot, a second
volley killed both the Linvilles and severely wounded Williams, who
after extraordinary sufferings finally reached the settlements. [93] In
May, 1767, four traders and a half-breed child of one of them were
killed in the Cherokee country. In the summer of this year Governor
William Tryon of North Carolina laid out the boundary line of the
Cherokees, and upon his return issued a proclamation forbidding any
purchase of land from the Indians and any issuance of grants for land
within one mile of the boundary line. Despite this wise precaution,
seven North Carolina hunters who during the following September had
lawlessly ventured into the mountain region some sixty miles beyond the
boundary were fired upon, and several of them killed, by the resentful
Cherokees. [94]
Undismayed by these signs of impending danger, undeterred even by the
tragic fate of the Linvilles, Daniel Boone, with the determination of
the indomitable pioneer, never dreamed of relinquishing his
long-cherished design. Discouraged by the steady disappearance of game
under the ruthless attack of innumerable hunters, Boone continued to
direct his thoughts toward the project of exploring the fair region of
Kentucky. The adventurous William Hill, to whom Boone communicated his
purpose, readily consented to go with him; and in the autumn of 1767
Boone and Hill, accompanied, it is believed, by Squire Boone, Daniel's
brother, set forth upon their almost inconceivably hazardous expedition.
They crossed the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, the Holston and Clinch
rivers near their sources, and finally reached the head waters of the
West Fork of the Big Sandy. Surmising from its course that this stream
must flow into the Ohio, they pushed on a hundred miles to the westward
and finally, by following a buffalo path, reached a salt-spring in what
is now Floyd County, in the extreme eastern section of Kentucky. Here
Boone beheld great droves of buffalo that visited the salt-spring to
drink the water or lick the brackish soil. After spending the winter in
hunting and trapping, the Boones and Hill, discouraged by the forbidding
aspect of the hilly country which with its dense growth of laurel was
exceedingly difficult to penetrate, abandoned all hope of finding
Kentucky by this route and wended their arduous way back to the Yadkin.
The account of Boone's subsequent accomplishment of his purpose must be
postponed to the next chapter.