Daniel Boone remains two years in North Carolina after his return
from the West--He prepares to emigrate to Kentucky--Character of
the early settlers to Kentucky--The first class, hunters--The
second class, small farmers--The third class, men of wealth and
government officers.
Daniel Boone had now returned to his home on the banks of the Yadkin,
after an absence of no less than two years, during which time he had
not tasted, as he remarks in his autobiography, either salt, sugar, or
bread. He must have enjoyed, in no ordinary degree, the comforts of
home. Carolina, however, was to be his home but for a short time. He had
fully determined to go with his family to Kentucky, and settle in that
lovely region. He was destined to found a State.
After Boone's return to North Carolina, more than two years passed away
before he could complete the arrangements necessary for removing his
family to Kentucky. He sold his farm on the Yadkin, which had been for
many years under cultivation, and no doubt brought him a sum amply
sufficient for the expenses of his journey and the furnishing of a new
home in the promised land. He had, of course, to overcome the natural
repugnance of his wife and children to leave the home which had become
dear to them; and he had also to enlist other adventurers to accompany
him. And here we deem it proper, before entering upon the account of his
departure, to quote from a contemporary,[20] some general remarks on
the character of the early settlers of Kentucky.
"Throughout the United States, generally, the most erroneous notions
prevail with respect to the character of the first settlers of Kentucky;
and by several of the American novelists, the most ridiculous uses have
been made of the fine materials for fiction which lie scattered over
nearly the whole extent of that region of daring adventure and romantic
incident. The common idea seems to be, that the first wanderers to
Kentucky were a simple, ignorant, low-bred, good-for-nothing set of
fellows, who left the frontiers and sterile places of the old States,
where a considerable amount of labor was necessary to secure a
livelihood, and sought the new and fertile country southeast of the Ohio
River and northwest of the Cumberland Mountains, where corn would
produce bread for them with simply the labor of planting, and where the
achievements of their guns would supply them with meat and clothing; a
set of men who, with that instinct which belongs to the beaver, built a
number of log cabins on the banks of some secluded stream, which they
surrounded with palisades for the better protection of their wives and
children, and then went wandering about, with guns on their shoulders,
or traps under their arms, leading a solitary, listless, _ruminating_
life, till aroused by the appearance of danger, or a sudden attack from
unseen enemies, when instantly they approved themselves the bravest of
warriors, and the most expert of strategists. The romancers who have
attempted to describe their habits of life and delineate their
characters, catching this last idea, and imagining things probable of
the country they were in, have drawn the one in lines the most grotesque
and absurd, and colored the other with a pencil dipped in all hues but
the right. To them the early pioneers appear to have been people of a
character demi-devil, demi-savage, not only with out the remains of
former civilization, but without even the recollection that they had
been born and bred where people were, at the least, measurably sane,
somewhat religiously inclined, and, for the most, civilly behaved.
"Both of these conceptions of the character of the Pioneer Fathers are,
to a certain extent, correct as regards _individuals_ among them; but
the pictures which have often been given us, even when held up beside
such _individuals_, will prove to be exaggerations in more respects than
one. Daniel Boone is an individual instance of a man plunging into the
depths of an unknown wilderness, shunning rather than seeking contact
with his kind, his gun and trap the only companions of his solitude,
and wandering about thus for months,"
"'No mark upon the tree, nor print, nor track,
To lead him forward, or to guide him back.'"
"contented and happy; yet, for all this, if those who knew him well had
any true conception of his character, Boone was a man of ambition, and
shrewdness, and energy, and fine social qualities, and extreme sagacity.
And individual instances there _may_ have been--though even this
possibility is not sustained by the primitive histories of those
times--of men who were so far _outre_ to the usual course of their
kind, as to have afforded originals for the _Sam Huggs_ the _Nimrod
Wildfires_, the _Ralph Stackpoles_, the _Tom Bruces_, and the
_Earthquakes_, which so abound in most of those fictions whose _locale_
is the Western country. But that naturalist who should attempt, by ever
so minute a description of a pied blackbird, to give his readers a
correct idea of the _Gracula Ferruginea_ of ornithologists, would not
more utterly fail of accomplishing his object, than have the authors
whose creations we have named, by delineating such individual
instances--by holding up, as it were, such _outre_ specimens of an
original class--failed to convey any thing like an accurate impression
of the habits, customs, and general character of the western pioneers.
"Daniel Boone, and those who accompanied him into the wildernesses of
Kentucky, had been little more than hunters in their original homes,
on the frontiers of North Carolina; and, with the exception of their
leader, but little more than hunters did they continue after their
emigration. The most glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of
the country northwest of the Laurel Ridge, had reached their ears from
Finley and his companions; and they shouldered their guns, strapped
their wallets upon their backs and wandered through the Cumberland Gap
into the dense forests, and thick brakes, and beautiful plains which
soon opened upon their visions, more to indulge a habit of roving, and
gratify an excited curiosity, than from any other motive; and, arrived
upon the head-waters of the Kentucky, they built themselves rude log
cabins, and spent most of their lives in hunting and eating, and
fighting marauding bands of Indians. Of a similar character were the
earliest Virginians, who penetrated these wildernesses. The very first,
indeed, who wandered from the parent State over the Laurel Ridge, down
into the unknown regions on its northwest, came avowedly as hunters and
trappers; and such of them as escaped the tomahawk of the Indian, with
very few exceptions, remained hunters and trappers till their deaths.
"But this first class of pioneers was not either numerous enough,
or influential enough, to stamp its character upon the after-coming
hundreds; and the second class of immigrants into Kentucky was composed
of very different materials. Small farmers from North Carolina,
Virginia, and Pennsylvania, for the most part, constituted this; and
these daring adventurers brought with them intelligent and aspiring
minds, industrious and persevering habits, a few of the comforts of
civilized life, and some of the implements of husbandry. A number of
them were men who had received the rudiments of an English education,
and not a few of them had been reared up in the spirit, and a sincere
observance of the forms, of religious worship. Many, perhaps most of
them, were from the frontier settlements of the States named; and these
combined the habits of the hunter and agriculturist, and possessed, with
no inconsiderable knowledge of partially refined life, all that boldness
and energy, which subsequently became so distinctive a trait of the
character of the early settlers.
"This second class of the pioneers, or at least the mass of those who
constituted it, sought the plains and forests, and streams of Kentucky,
not to indulge any inclination for listless ramblings; nor as hunters or
trappers; nor yet for the purpose of gratifying an awakened curiosity:
they came deliberately, soberly, thoughtfully, _in search of a home_,
determined, from the outset, to win one, or perish in the attempt; they
came to cast their lot in a land that was new, to better their worldly
condition by the acquisition of demesnes, to build up a new commonwealth
in an un-peopled region; they came with their wives, and their children,
and their kindred, from places where the toil of the hand, and the sweat
of the brow, could hardly supply them with bread, to a land in which
ordinary industry would, almost at once, furnish all the necessaries of
life, and when it was plain well-directed effort would ultimately secure
its ease, its dignity, and its refinements. Poor in the past, and with
scarce a hope, without a change of place, of a better condition of
earthly existence, either for themselves or their offspring, they saw
themselves, _with_ that change, rich in the future, and looked forward
with certainty to a time when their children, if not themselves, would
be in a condition improved beyond compare.
"There was also a third class of pioneers, who in several respects
differed as much from either the first or the second class, as these
differed from each other. This class was composed, in great part, of men
who came to Kentucky after the way had been in some measure prepared for
immigrants, and yet before the setting in of that tide of population
which, a year or two after the close of the American Revolution, poured
so rapidly into these fertile regions from several of the Atlantic
States. In this class of immigrants, there were many gentlemen of
education, refinement, and no inconsiderable wealth; some of whom came
to Kentucky as surveyors, others as commissioners from the parent State,
and others again as land speculators; but most of them as _bona fide_
immigrants, determined to pitch their tents in the Great West, at once
to become _units_ of a new people, and to grow into affluence, and
consideration, and renown, with the growth of a young and vigorous
commonwealth.
"Such were the founders of Kentucky; and in them we behold the elements
of a society inferior, in all the essentials of goodness and greatness,
to none in the world. First came the hunter and trapper, to trace the
river courses, and spy out the choice spots of the land; then came the
small farmer and the hardy adventurer, to cultivate the rich plains
discovered, and lay the nucleuses of the towns and cities, which were
so soon, and so rapidly, to spring up; and then came the surveyor, to
mark the boundaries of individual possessions and give civil shape and
strength to the unformed mass, the speculator to impart a new activity
and keenness to the minds of men, and the chivalrous and educated
gentleman, to infuse into the crude materials here collected together,
the feelings and sentiments of refined existence, and to mold them into
forms of conventional beauty and social excellence. Kentucky now began
to have a _society_, in which were the sinews of war, the power of
production, and the genius of improvement; and from this time, though
still harassed, as she had been from the beginning, by the inroads of
a brave and determined enemy on her north, her advancement was regular
and rapid."
[Footnote 20: W.D. Gallagher, "Hesperian," Vol. II., p 89.]