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document have been preserved. Obvious typographical
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[Illustration: DANIEL BOONE.
From the portrait by Chester Harding made in 1819, when Boone was
eighty-five years old. (See pp. 237-239.)]
DANIEL BOONE
by
REUBEN GOLD THWAITES
Author of "Father Marquette," "The Colonies, 1492-1750,"
"Down Historic Waterways," "Afloat on the
Ohio," etc.; Editor of "The Jesuit Relations and
Allied Documents," "Chronicles of Border
Warfare," "Wisconsin Historical
Collections," etc.
Illustrated
NEW YORK
D. Appleton & Company
1902
Copyright, 1902
By D. Appleton and Company
Published September, 1902
TO THE MEMORY OF THE LATE
LYMAN COPELAND DRAPER, LL.D.
WHOSE UNPARALLELED COLLECTION OF
MANUSCRIPT MATERIALS FOR WESTERN
HISTORY IN THE LIBRARY OF THE
WISCONSIN STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
HAS MADE PRACTICABLE THE
PREPARATION OF THIS LITTLE BOOK
PREFACE
Poets, historians, and orators have for a hundred years sung the praises
of Daniel Boone as the typical backwoodsman of the trans-Alleghany
region. Despite popular belief, he was not really the founder of
Kentucky. Other explorers and hunters had been there long before him; he
himself was piloted through Cumberland Gap by John Finley; and his was
not even the first permanent settlement in Kentucky, for Harrodsburg
preceded it by nearly a year; his services in defense of the West,
during nearly a half century of border warfare, were not comparable to
those of George Rogers Clark or Benjamin Logan; as a commonwealth
builder he was surpassed by several. Nevertheless, Boone's picturesque
career possesses a romantic and even pathetic interest that can never
fail to charm the student of history. He was great as a hunter,
explorer, surveyor, and land-pilot--probably he found few equals as a
rifleman; no man on the border knew Indians more thoroughly or fought
them more skilfully than he; his life was filled to the brim with
perilous adventures. He was not a man of affairs, he did not understand
the art of money-getting, and he lost his lands because, although a
surveyor, he was careless of legal forms of entry. He fled before the
advance of the civilization which he had ushered in: from Pennsylvania,
wandering with his parents to North Carolina in search of broader lands;
thence into Kentucky because the Carolina borders were crowded; then to
the Kanawha Valley, for the reason that Kentucky was being settled too
fast to suit his fancy; lastly to far-off Missouri, in order, as he
said, to get "elbow room." Experiences similar to his have made
misanthropes of many another man--like Clark, for instance; but the
temperament of this honest, silent, nature-loving man only mellowed with
age; his closing years were radiant with the sunshine of serene content
and the dimly appreciated consciousness of world-wide fame; and he died
full of years, in heart a simple hunter to the last--although he had
also served with credit as magistrate, soldier, and legislator. At his
death the Constitutional Convention of Missouri went into mourning for
twenty days, and the State of Kentucky claimed his bones, and has
erected over them a suitable monument.
There have been published many lives of Boone, but none of them in
recent years. Had the late Dr. Lyman Copeland Draper, of Wisconsin, ever
written the huge biography for which he gathered materials throughout a
lifetime of laborious collection, those volumes--there were to be
several--would doubtless have uttered the last possible word concerning
the famous Kentucky pioneer. Draper's manuscript, however, never
advanced beyond a few chapters; but the raw materials which he gathered
for this work, and for many others of like character, are now in the
library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, available to all
scholars. From this almost inexhaustible treasure-house the present
writer has obtained the bulk of his information, and has had the
advantage of being able to consult numerous critical notes made by his
dear and learned friend. A book so small as this, concerning a character
every phase of whose career was replete with thrilling incident, would
doubtless not have won the approbation of Dr. Draper, whose
unaccomplished biographical plans were all drawn upon a large scale; but
we are living in a busy age, and life is brief--condensation is the
necessary order of the day. It will always be a source of regret that
Draper's projected literary monument to Boone was not completed for the
press, although its bulk would have been forbidding to any but
specialists, who would have sought its pages as a cyclopedia of Western
border history.
Through the courtesy both of Colonel Reuben T. Durrett, of Louisville,
President of the Filson Club, and of Mrs. Ranck, we are permitted to
include among our illustrations reproductions of some of the plates in
the late George W. Ranck's stately monograph upon Boonesborough. Aid in
tracing original portraits of Boone has been received from Mrs. Jennie
C. Morton and General Fayette Hewitt, of Frankfort; Miss Marjory Dawson
and Mr. W. G. Lackey, of St. Louis; Mr. William H. King, of Winnetka,
Ill.; and Mr. J. Marx Etting, of Philadelphia.
R. G. T.
MADISON, WIS., _1902_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE vii
I. ANCESTRY AND TRAINING 1
II. THE NIMROD OF THE YADKIN 13
III. LIFE ON THE BORDER 24
IV. RED MAN AGAINST WHITE MAN 35
V. KENTUCKY REACHED AT LAST 55
VI. ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS 71
VII. PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES 85
VIII. THE HERO OF CLINCH VALLEY 97
IX. THE SETTLEMENT OF KENTUCKY 113
X. TWO YEARS OF DARKNESS 129
XI. THE SIEGE OF BOONESBOROUGH 146
XII. SOLDIER AND STATESMAN 169
XIII. KENTUCKY'S PATH OF THORNS 192
XIV. IN THE KANAWHA VALLEY 211
XV. A SERENE OLD AGE 223
INDEX 243
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Portrait of Daniel Boone _Frontispiece_
Boone's powder-horn and bake-kettle 30
A Boone tree, 1760 56
A survey note by Boone 120
Fort Boonesborough 136
Climax of the treaty 162
Site of Boonesborough to-day 174
Boone's cabin in St. Charles County, Missouri 224
Nathan Boone's house in St. Charles County, Missouri 230
Boone's religious views (two pages) 234
Boone's monument at Frankfort, Ky. 240
DANIEL BOONE
CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY AND TRAINING
The grandfather of Daniel Boone--George by name--was born in 1666 at the
peaceful little hamlet of Stoak, near the city of Exeter, in Devonshire,
England. His father had been a blacksmith; but he himself acquired the
weaver's art. In due time George married Mary Maugridge, a young woman
three years his junior, and native of the neighboring village of
Bradninch, whither he had gone to follow his trade. This worthy couple,
professed Quakers, became the parents of nine children, all born in
Bradninch--George, Sarah, Squire,[1] Mary, John, Joseph, Benjamin,
James, and Samuel. All of these, except John, married, and left
numerous descendants in America.
The elder Boones were ambitious for the welfare of their large family.
They were also fretful under the bitter intolerance encountered by
Quakers in those unrestful times. As the children grew to maturity, the
enterprising weaver sought information regarding the colony which his
coreligionist William Penn had, some thirty years previous, established
in America, where were promised cheap lands, religious freedom,
political equality, and exact justice to all men. There were then no
immigration bureaus to encourage and instruct those who proposed
settling in America; no news-letters from traveling correspondents, to
tell the people at home about the Western world; or books or pamphlets
illustrating the country. The only method which occurred to George
Boone, of Bradninch, by which he could satisfy himself regarding the
possibilities of Pennsylvania as a future home for his household, was to
send out some of his older children as prospectors.
Accordingly--somewhere about 1712-14, family tradition says--young
George (aged from twenty-two to twenty-four years), Sarah (a year and a
half younger), and Squire (born November 25, 1696) were despatched to
the promised land, and spent several months in its inspection. Leaving
Sarah and Squire in Pennsylvania, George returned to his parents with a
favorable report.
On the seventeenth of August, 1717, the Boones, parents and children,
bade a sorrowful but brave farewell to their relatives and friends in
old Bradninch, whom they were never again to see. After journeying some
eighty miles over rugged country to the port of Bristol, they there
entered a sailing vessel bound for Philadelphia, where they safely
arrived upon the tenth of October.
Philadelphia was then but a village. Laid out like a checker-board, with
architecture of severe simplicity, its best residences were surrounded
by gardens and orchards. The town was substantial, neat, and had the
appearance of prosperity; but the frontier was not far away--beyond
outlying fields the untamed forest closed in upon the little capital.
The fur trade flourished but two or three days' journey into the forest,
and Indians were frequently seen upon the streets. When, therefore, the
Boones decided to settle in what is now Abingdon, twelve or fourteen
miles north of the town, in a sparse neighborhood of Quaker farmers,
they at once became backwoodsmen, such as they remained for the rest of
their lives.
They were, however, not long in Abingdon. Soon after, we find them
domiciled a few miles to the northwest in the little frontier hamlet of
North Wales, in Gwynedd township; this was a Welsh community whose
members had, a few years before, turned Quakers.
Sarah Boone appears, about this time, to have married one Jacob Stover,
a German who settled in Oley township, now in Berks County. The elder
George Boone, now that he had become accustomed to moving, after his
long, quiet years as a Devonshire weaver, appears to have made small ado
over folding his family tent and seeking other pastures. In 1718 he took
out a warrant for four hundred acres of land in Oley, and near the
close of the following year removed to his daughter's neighborhood.
This time he settled in earnest, for here in Oley--or rather the later
subdivision thereof called Exeter--he spent the remainder of his days,
dying in his original log cabin there, in 1744, at the age of
seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten
great-grandchildren--in all, seventy descendants: Devonshire men,
Germans, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish amalgamated into a sturdy race of
American pioneers.
Among the early Welsh Quakers in the rustic neighborhood of North Wales
were the Morgans. On the twenty-third of July, 1720, at the Gwynedd
meeting-house, in accordance with the Quaker ceremony, Squire Boone
married Sarah Morgan, daughter of John. A descendant tells us that at
this time "Squire Boone was a man of rather small stature, fair
complexion, red hair, and gray eyes; while his wife was a woman
something over the common size, strong and active, with black hair and
eyes, and raised in the Quaker order."
For ten or eleven years Squire and Sarah Boone lived in Gwynedd
township, probably on rented land, the former adding to their small
income by occasional jobs of weaving, for he had learned his father's
trade. They were thrifty folk, but it took ten years under these
primitive conditions to accumulate even the small sum sufficient to
acquire a farm of their own. Toward the close of the year 1730, Squire
obtained for a modest price a grant of 250 acres of land situated in his
father's township, Oley--a level tract adapted to grazing purposes, on
Owatin Creek, some eight miles southeast of the present city of Reading,
and a mile and a half from Exeter meeting-house. Here, probably early in
1731, the Boones removed with their four children. Relatives and Quaker
neighbors assisted, after the manner of the frontier, in erecting a log
cabin for the new-comers and in clearing and fencing for them a small
patch of ground.
In this rude backwoods home, in the valley of the Schuylkill, was born,
upon the second of November (new style), 1734, Daniel Boone, fourth son
and sixth child of Squire and Sarah. It is thought that the name Daniel
was suggested by that of Daniel Boone, a well-known Dutch painter who
had died in London in 1698, "and who may have been known, or distantly
related, to the family." The other children were: Sarah (born in 1724),
Israel (1726), Samuel (1728), Jonathan (1730), Elizabeth (1732), Mary
(1736), George (1739), Edward (1744), Squire, and Hannah, all of them
natives of Oley.[2]
Born into a frontier community, Daniel Boone's entire life was spent
amid similar surroundings, varying only in degree. With the sight of
Indians he was from the first familiar. They frequently visited Oley and
Exeter, and were cordially received by the Quakers. George Boone's house
was the scene of many a friendly gathering of the tribesmen. When Daniel
was eight years of age, the celebrated Moravian missionary, Count
Zinzendorf, held a synod in a barn at Oley, a party of converted
Delaware Indians, who preached in favor of Christianity, being the
principal attractions at this meeting. Thus young Boone started in life
with an accurate knowledge of the American savage, which served him well
during his later years of adventurous exploration and settlement-building.
Squire Boone appears soon to have become a leader in his community. His
farm, to whose acres he from time to time added, was attended to as
closely as was usual among the frontiersmen of his day; and at home the
business of weaving was not neglected, for he kept in frequent
employment five or six looms, making "homespun" cloths for his neighbors
and the market. He had an excellent grazing range some five or six miles
north of the homestead, and each season sent his stock thither, as was
the custom at that time. Mrs. Boone and Daniel accompanied the cows, and
from early spring until late in autumn lived in a rustic cabin, far from
any other human beings. Hard by, over a cool spring, was a dairy-house,
in which the stout-armed mother made and kept her butter and cheese;
while her favorite boy watched the herd as, led by their bell-carriers,
they roamed at will through the woods, his duty at sunset being to drive
them to the cabin for milking, and later to lock them for the night
within the cow-pens, secure from wild animals or prowling
cattle-thieves.
While tending his cattle, a work involving abundant leisure, the young
herdsman was also occupied in acquiring the arts of the forest. For the
first two or three years--his pastoral life having commenced at the
tender age of ten--his only weapon was a slender, smoothly shaved
sapling, with a small bunch of gnarled roots at the end, in throwing
which he grew so expert as easily to kill birds and other small game.
When reaching the dignity of a dozen years, his father bought him a
rifle, with which he soon became an unerring marksman. But, although he
henceforth provided wild meat enough for the family, his passion for
hunting sometimes led him to neglect the cattle, which were allowed to
stray far from home and pass the night in the deep forest.
Soon each summer of herding came to be succeeded by a winter's hunt. In
this occupation the boy roved far and wide over the Neversink
mountain-range to the north and west of Monocacy Valley, killing and
curing game for the family, and taking the skins to Philadelphia, where
he exchanged them for articles needed in the chase--long hunting-knives,
and flints, lead, and powder for his gun.
In those days the children of the frontier grew up with but slight store
of such education as is obtainable from books. The open volume of
nature, however, they carefully conned. The ways of the wilderness they
knew full well--concerning the storms and floods, the trees and hills,
the wild animals and the Indians, they were deeply learned; well they
knew how to live alone in the forest, and to thrive happily although
surrounded by a thousand lurking dangers. This quiet, mild-mannered,
serious-faced Quaker youth, Daniel Boone, was an ardent lover of the
wild woods and their inhabitants, which he knew as did Audubon and
Thoreau; but of regular schooling he had none. When he was about
fourteen years of age, his brother Samuel, nearly seven years his
senior, married Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who had more
education than was customary in this neighborhood. Sarah taught Daniel
the elements of "the three R's." To this knowledge he added somewhat by
later self-teaching, so that as a man he could read understandingly, do
rough surveying, keep notes of his work, and write a sensible although
badly spelled letter--for our backwoods hero was, in truth, no scholar,
although as well equipped in this direction as were most of his fellows.
In time Squire Boone, a man of enterprise and vigor, added blacksmithing
to his list of occupations, and employed his young sons in this lusty
work. Thus Daniel served, for a time, as a worker in iron as well as a
hunter and herdsman; although it was noticed that his art was chiefly
developed in the line of making and mending whatever pertained to traps
and guns. He was a fearless rider of his father's horses; quick, though
bred a Quaker, to resent what he considered wrong treatment;[3] true to
his young friends; fond of long, solitary tramps through the dark
forest, or of climbing hilltops for bird's-eye views of the
far-stretching wilderness. Effective training this, for the typical
pioneer of North America.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Not an abbreviation of "esquire," as has been supposed, but given
because of some old family connection. This name was transmitted through
several generations of Boones.
[2] Edward was killed by Indians when thirty-six years old, and Squire
died at the age of seventy-six. Their brothers and sisters lived to ages
varying from eighty-three to ninety-one.
[3] Indeed, it is a matter of record that other members also of this
stout-hearted Devonshire family were "sometimes rather too belligerent
and self-willed," and had "occasionally to be dealt with by the
meeting." Daniel's oldest sister, Sarah, married a man who was not a
Quaker, and consequently she was "disowned" by the society. His oldest
brother, Israel, also married a worldling and was similarly treated; and
their father, who countenanced Israel's disloyal act and would not
retract his error, was in 1748 likewise expelled.