KENTUCKY REACHED AT LAST
When Daniel Boone returned from tidewater Virginia to the Yadkin region
is not now known. It is probable that the monotony of hauling tobacco to
market at a time when his old neighbors were living in a state of panic
palled upon a man who loved excitement and had had a taste of Indian
warfare. It has been surmised that he served with the Rowan rangers upon
Lyttleton's campaign, alluded to in the previous chapter, and possibly
aided in defending Fort Dobbs, or served with Waddell under Montgomery.
That he was, some time in 1760, in the mountains west of the Yadkin upon
either a hunt or a scout, or both, appears to be well established; for
up to a few years ago there was still standing upon the banks of Boone's
Creek, a small tributary of the Watauga in eastern Tennessee, a tree
upon whose smooth bark had been rudely carved this characteristic
legend, undoubtedly by the great hunter himself: "D Boon cilled A BAR on
this tree year 1760."[7]
We have already seen that he accompanied Waddell in 1761, when that
popular frontier leader reenforced Colonel Byrd's expedition against the
Cherokees. Upon Waddell's return to North Carolina his leather-shirted
followers dispersed to their homes, and Boone was again enabled to
undertake a protracted hunt, no longer disturbed by fear that in his
absence Indians might raid the settlement; for hunting was now his chief
occupation, his wife and children conducting the farm, which held second
place in his affections. Thus we see how close the borderers came to the
savage life wherein men are the warriors and hunters and women the
crop-gatherers and housekeepers. Organizing a party of kindred
spirits--a goodly portion of the Yadkin settlers were more hunters than
farmers--Boone crossed the mountains and roamed through the valleys of
southwest Virginia and eastern Tennessee, being especially delighted
with the Valley of the Holston, where game was found to be unusually
abundant. At about the same time another party of nineteen hunters went
upon a similar expedition into the hills and valleys westward of the
Yadkin, penetrating well into Tennessee, and being absent for eighteen
months.
[Illustration: A BOONE TREE.
Tree on Boone's Creek, Tenn., bearing Daniel Boone's autograph. (See
pp. 55, 56.)]
We must not conclude, from the passionate devotion to hunting exhibited
by these backwoodsmen of the eighteenth century, that they led the same
shiftless, aimless lives as are followed by the "poor whites" found in
some of the river-bottom communities of our own day, who are in turn
farmers, fishermen, or hunters, as fancy or the seasons dictate. It must
be remembered that farming upon the Virginia and Carolina uplands was,
in the pioneer period, crude as to methods and insignificant as to
crops. The principal wealth of the well-to-do was in herds of horses and
cattle which grazed in wild meadows, and in droves of long-nosed swine
feeding upon the roots and acorns of the hillside forests. Among the
outlying settlers much of the family food came from the woods, and
often months would pass without bread being seen inside the cabin walls.
Besides the live stock of the richer folk, whose herds were driven to
market, annual caravans to tidewater towns carried furs and skins won by
the real backwoodsmen, who lived on the fringe of the wilderness. For
lack of money accounts were kept in pelts, and with these were purchased
rifles, ammunition, iron, and salt. It was, then, to the forests that
the borderers largely looked for their sustenance. Hence those long
hunts, from which the men of the Yadkin, unerring marksmen, would come
back laden with great packs of pelts for the markets, and dried venison,
bear's meat, and bear's oil for their family larders. Naturally, this
wandering, adventurous life, spiced with excitement in many forms,
strongly appealed to the rough, hardy borderers, and unfitted them for
other occupations. Under such conditions farming methods were not likely
to improve, nor the arts of civilization to prosper; for the hunter not
only best loved the wilderness, but settlement narrowed his
hunting-grounds. Thus it was that the frontiersman of the Daniel Boone
type, Indian hater as he was, had at heart much the same interests as
the savage whom he was seeking to supplant. It was simply a question as
to which hunter, red or white, should occupy the forest; to neither was
settlement welcome.
With the opening of 1762 the southwest border began to be reoccupied.
The abandoned log cabins once more had fires lighted upon their hearths,
at the base of the great outside chimneys of stones and mud-plastered
boughs; the deserted clearings, which had become choked with weeds and
underbrush in the five years of Indian warfare, were again cultivated by
their reassured owners. Among the returned refugees were Daniel's
parents, Squire and Sarah Boone, who had ridden on horseback overland
all the way from Maryland. Three years later Squire Boone died, one of
the most highly esteemed men in the valley.
The Yadkin country was more favored than some other portions of the
backwoods of North Carolina. Pontiac's uprising (1763) against the
English, who had now supplanted the French in Canada and in the
wilderness between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, led some of the
Southern tribes again to attack the frontiers of the Southwest; but they
were defeated before the Yadkin was affected by this fresh panic.
The Indian wars had lasted so long that the entire border had become
demoralized. Of course not all the people in the backwoods were of good
character. Not a few of them had been driven out from the more thickly
settled parts of the country because of crimes or of bad reputation; and
some of the fur-traders who lived upon the edge of the settlement were
sorry rogues. When the panic-stricken people were crowded within the
narrow walls of the forts they could not work. Many of them found this
life of enforced idleness to their liking, and fell into the habit of
making secret expeditions to plunder abandoned houses and to steal
uncared-for live stock. When peace came these marauders had acquired a
distaste for honest labor; leaving the forts, they pillaged right and
left, and horse-stealing became an especially prevalent frontier vice.
Justice on the border was as yet insufficiently organized. Some of the
Virginia and Carolina magistrates were themselves rascals, whose
decisions could be purchased by criminals. Many of the best citizens,
therefore, formed associations whose members were called "regulators."
They bound themselves to pursue, arrest, and try criminals, and to
punish them by whipping, also by expulsion from the neighborhood. The
law-breakers, on the other hand, organized in defense, and popular
opinion was divided between the two elements; for there were some good
people who did not like the arbitrary methods of the regulators, and
insisted upon every man being given a regular trial by jury. In South
Carolina, particularly, the settlers were much exercised on this
question, and arrayed themselves into opposing bands, armed to carry out
their respective views. For a time civil war was feared; but finally,
after five years of disturbance, an agreement was reached, efficient
courts were established, and justice triumphed.
Affairs did not reach so serious a stage in North Carolina. Nevertheless
there were several bands of vicious and indolent men, who, entrenched
in the hills, long defied the regulators. One of these parties built a
rude stockaded fort beneath an overhanging cliff in the mountains back
of the Yadkin settlements. They stole horses, cattle, farming utensils;
in fact, anything that they could lay their hands upon. One day they
grew so bold as to kidnap a girl. The settlers, now roused to action,
organized attacking companies, one of them headed by Daniel Boone, and
carried the log fortress of the bandits by storm. The culprits were
taken to Salisbury jail and the clan broken up.
The rapid growth of the country soon made game scarce in Boone's
neighborhood. Not only did the ever-widening area of cleared fields
destroy the cover, but there were, of course, more hunters than before.
Thus our Nimrod, who in his early manhood cared for nothing smaller than
deer, was compelled to take extended trips in his search for
less-frequented places. It was not long before he had explored all the
mountains and valleys within easy reach, and become familiar with the
views from every peak in the region, many of them five and six thousand
feet in height.
As early as 1764-65 Boone was in the habit of taking with him, upon
these trips near home, his little son James, then seven or eight years
of age. This was partly for company, but mainly for the lad's education
as a hunter. Frequently they would spend several days together in the
woods during the autumn and early winter--the deer-hunting season--and
often, when in "open" camps, were overtaken by snow-storms. On such
occasions the father would keep the boy warm by clasping him to his
bosom as they lay with feet toward the glowing camp-fire. As the
well-taught lad grew into early manhood these two companions would be
absent from home for two and three months together, always returning
well laden with the spoils of the chase.
Hunters in Boone's day had two kinds of camp--"open" when upon the move,
which meant sleeping in their blankets upon the ground wherever darkness
or weariness overtook them; "closed" where remaining for some time in a
locality. A closed camp consisted of a rude hut of logs or poles, the
front entirely open, the sides closely chinked with moss, and the roof
covered with blankets, boughs, or bark, sloping down to a back-log. In
times when the Indians were not feared a fire was kept up throughout the
night, in front, in order to warm the enclosure. Upon a bed of hemlock
boughs or of dried leaves the hunters lay with heads to the back-log and
stockinged feet to the blaze, for their spongy moccasins were hung to
dry.[8] Such a camp, often called a "half-faced cabin," was carefully
placed so that it might be sheltered by neighboring hills from the cold
north and west winds. It was fairly successful as a protection from rain
and snow, and sometimes served a party of hunters throughout several
successive seasons; but it was ill-fitted for the coldest weather. Boone
frequently occupied a shelter of this kind in the woods of Kentucky.
During the last four months of 1765 Boone and seven companions went on
horseback to the new colony of Florida with a view to moving thither if
they found it suited to their tastes. Wherever possible, they stopped
overnight at borderers' cabins upon the frontiers of the Carolinas and
Georgia. But such opportunities did not always occur; they often
suffered from hunger, and once they might have died from starvation but
for the timely succor of a roving band of Seminole Indians. They
explored Florida all the way from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and appear
to have had a rather wretched time of it. The trails were miry from
frequent rains, the number and extent of the swamps appalled them, and
there was not game enough to satisfy a man like Boone, who scorned
alligators. Pensacola, however, so pleased him that he determined to
settle there, and purchased a house and lot which he might in due time
occupy. Upon their return Boone told his wife of his Pensacola venture,
but this sturdy woman of the frontier spurned the idea of moving to a
gameless land. So the town lot was left to take care of itself, and
henceforth the dutiful husband looked only to the West as his model of a
perfect country.
At the close of the French and Indian War there arrived in the Boone
settlement a Scotch-Irishman named Benjamin Cutbirth, aged about
twenty-three years. He was a man of good character and a fine hunter.
Marrying Elizabeth Wilcoxen, a niece of Daniel Boone, he and Boone went
upon long hunts together, and attained that degree of comradeship which
joint life in a wilderness camp is almost certain to produce.
In 1766 several families from North Carolina went to Louisiana,
apparently by sea to New Orleans, and founded an English settlement
above Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River. The news of this event gave
rise to a general desire for exploring the country between the mountains
and the great river. The year following, Cutbirth, John Stuart, John
Baker, and John Ward, all of them young married men on the Yadkin, and
excellent hunters, resolved to perform this feat, and if possible to
discover a region superior to their own valley. They crossed the
mountain range and eventually saw the Mississippi, being, so far as we
know from contemporary documents, the first party of white men to
succeed in this overland enterprise. Possibly fur-traders may have done
so before them, but they left no record to prove it.
Cutbirth and his friends spent a year or two upon the river. In the
autumn they ascended the stream for a considerable distance, also one of
its tributaries, made a stationary camp for the winter, and in the
spring descended to New Orleans, where they sold at good prices their
skins, furs, bear-bacon, bear's oil, buffalo "jerk" (dried meat),
tallow, and dried venison hams. Their expedition down the river was
performed at great risks, for they had many hairbreadth escapes from
snags, river banks shelving in, whirlpools, wind-storms, and Indians.
Their reward, says a chronicler of the day, was "quite a respectable
property;" but while upon their return homeward, overland, they were set
upon by Choctaws, who robbed them of their all.
Meanwhile, Daniel Boone was slow in making up his mind to leave home and
the wife and family whom he dearly loved for so long and perilous a trip
as a journey into the now much-talked-of land of Kentucky. Perhaps,
despite his longings, he might never have gone had affairs upon the
Yadkin remained satisfactory to him. But game, his chief reliance, was
year by year becoming harder to obtain. And the rascally agents of Earl
Granville, the principal landholder of the region, from whom the Boones
had purchased, were pretending to find flaws in the land-titles and
insisting upon the necessity for new deeds, for which large fees were
exacted.
This gave rise to great popular discontent. Boone's protest consisted in
leaving the Sugar Tree settlement and moving northwest for sixty-five
miles toward the head of the Yadkin. His new cabin, a primitive shell of
logs, could still be seen, a few years ago, at the foot of a range of
hills some seven and a half miles above Wilkesboro, in Wilkes County.
After a time, dissatisfied with this location, he moved five miles
farther up the river and about half a mile up Beaver Creek. Again he
changed his mind, choosing his final home on the upper Yadkin, just
above the mouth of Beaver. It was from this beautiful region among the
Alleghany foot-hills, where game and fish were plenty and his swine and
cattle had good range, that Boone, crowded out by advancing
civilization, eventually moved to Kentucky.
In the spring and early summer of 1767 there were fresh outbreaks on the
part of the Indians. Governor Tryon had run a boundary-line between the
back settlements of the Carolinas and the Cherokee hunting-grounds. But
hunters and traders would persist in wandering to the west of this line,
and sometimes they were killed.
In the autumn of that year Daniel Boone and a warm friend, William Hill,
and possibly Squire Boone, determined to seek Kentucky, of which Finley
had told him twelve years before. They crossed the mountain wall, were
in the valleys of the Holston and the Clinch, and reached the head
waters of the West Fork of the Big Sandy. Following down this river for
a hundred miles, determined to find the Ohio, they appear to have struck
a buffalo-path, along which they traveled as far as a salt-lick ten
miles west of the present town of Prestonburg, on a tributary of the
West (or Louisa) Fork of the Sandy, within Floyd County, in the extreme
eastern part of Kentucky.
Caught in a severe snow-storm, they were compelled to camp at this lick
for the entire winter. It proved to be the most profitable station that
they could have selected, for buffaloes and other animals came in large
numbers to lick the brackish soil, and all the hunters had to do was to
"rise, kill, and eat."
Although now considerably west of the Cumberland Mountains, the
explorers were not aware that they were within the famed Kentucky; and
as the country was very hilly, covered with briers which annoyed them
greatly, and altogether forbidding, they despaired of reaching the
promised land by this path, and in the spring returned to the Yadkin.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Boone had a strong fancy for carving his name and hunting feats upon
trees. His wanderings have very largely been traced by this means.
[8] When Indians were about, moccasins were always tied to the guns so
as to be ready to slip on in case of a night alarm.