IN THE KANAWHA VALLEY
During his early years on the Kanawha, Boone kept a small store at Point
Pleasant. Later, he moved to the neighborhood of Charleston, where he
was engaged in the usual variety of occupations--piloting immigrants; as
deputy surveyor of Kanawha County, surveying lands for settlers and
speculators; taking small contracts for victualing the militia, who were
frequently called out to protect the country from Indian forays; and in
hunting. Some of his expeditions took him to the north of the Ohio,
where he had several narrow escapes from capture and death at the hands
of the enemy, and even into his old haunts on the Big Sandy, the
Licking, and the Kentucky.
He traveled much, for a frontiersman. In 1788 he went with his wife and
their son Nathan by horseback to the old Pennsylvania home in Berks
County, where they spent a month with kinsfolk and friends. We find him
in Maysville, on a business trip, during the year; indeed, there are
evidences of numerous subsequent visits to that port. In May of the
following year he was on the Monongahela River with a drove of horses
for sale, Brownsville then being an important market for ginseng,
horses, and cattle; and in the succeeding July he writes to a client,
for whom he had done some surveying, that he would be in Philadelphia
during the coming winter.
In October, 1789, there came to him, as the result of a popular
petition, the appointment of lieutenant-colonel of Kanawha County--the
first military organization in the valley; and in other ways he was
treated with marked distinction by the primitive border folk of the
valley, both because of his brilliant career in Kentucky and the fact
that he was a surveyor and could write letters. One who knew him
intimately at this time has left a pleasing description of the man,
which will assist us in picturing him as he appeared to his new
neighbors: "His large head, full chest, square shoulders, and stout
form are still impressed upon my mind. He was (I think) about five feet
ten inches in height, and his weight say 175. He was solid in mind as
well as in body, never frivolous, thoughtless, or agitated; but was
always quiet, meditative, and impressive, unpretentious, kind, and
friendly in his manner. He came very much up to the idea we have of the
old Grecian philosophers--particularly Diogenes."
By the summer of 1790, Indian raids again became almost unbearable.
Fresh robberies and murders were daily reported in Kentucky, and along
the Ohio and the Wabash. The expedition of Major J. F. Hamtramck, of the
Federal Army, against the tribesmen on the Wabash, resulted in the
burning of a few villages and the destruction of much corn; but Colonel
Josiah Harmar's expedition in October against the towns on the Scioto
and the St. Joseph, at the head of nearly 1,500 men, ended in failure
and a crushing defeat, although the Indian losses were so great that the
army was allowed to return to Cincinnati unmolested. Boone does not
appear to have taken part in these operations, his militiamen probably
being needed for home protection.
The following year the General Government for the first time took the
field against the Indians in earnest. For seven years it had attempted
to bring the tribesmen to terms by means of treaties, but without avail.
Roused to fury by the steady increase of settlement north as well as
south of the Ohio, the savages were making life a torment to the
borderers. War seemed alone the remedy. In June, General Charles Scott,
of Kentucky, raided the Miami and Wabash Indians. Two months later
General James Wilkinson, with five hundred Kentuckians, laid waste a
Miami village and captured many prisoners. These were intended but to
open the road for an expedition of far greater proportions. In October,
Governor Arthur St. Clair, of the Northwest Territory, a broken-down man
unequal to such a task, was despatched against the Miami towns with an
ill-organized army of two thousand raw troops. Upon the fourth of
November they were surprised near the principal Miami village; hundreds
of the men fled at the first alarm, and of those who remained over six
hundred fell during the engagement, while nearly three hundred were
wounded. This disastrous termination of the campaign demoralized the
West and left the entire border again open to attack--an advantage which
the scalping parties did not neglect.
While this disaster was occurring, Boone was again sitting in the
legislature at Richmond, where he represented Kanawha County from
October 17th to December 20th. The journals of the Assembly show him to
have been a silent member, giving voice only in yea and nay; but he was
placed upon two then important committees--religion, and propositions
and licenses. It was voted to send ammunition for the militia on the
Monongahela and the Kanawha, who were to be called out for the defense
of the frontier. Before leaving Richmond, Boone wrote as follows to the
governor:
"Monday 13th Dec 1791
"Sir as sum purson Must Carry out the armantstion
[ammunition] to Red Stone [Brownsville, Pa.,] if your
Exclency should have thought me a proper purson I would
undertake it on conditions I have the apintment to vitel
the company at Kanhowway [Kanawha] so that I Could take
Down the flowre as I paste that place I am your
Excelenceys most obedent omble servant
"DAL BOONE."
Five days later the contract was awarded to him; and we find among his
papers receipts, obtained at several places on his way home, for the
lead and flints which he was to deliver to the various military centers.
But the following May, Colonel George Clendennin sharply complains to
the governor that the ammunition and rations which Boone was to have
supplied to Captain Caperton's rangers had not yet been delivered, and
that Clendennin was forced to purchase these supplies from others. It
does not appear from the records how this matter was settled; but as
there seems to have been no official inquiry, the non-delivery was
probably the result of a misunderstanding.
At last, after a quarter of a century of bloodshed, the United States
Government was prepared to act in an effective manner. General Anthony
Wayne--"Mad Anthony," of Stony Point--after spending a year and a half
in reorganizing the Western army, established himself, in the winter of
1793-94, in a log fort at Greenville, eighty miles north of Cincinnati,
and built a strong outpost at Fort Recovery, on the scene of St. Clair's
defeat. After resisting an attack on Fort Recovery made on the last day
of June by over two thousand painted warriors from the Upper Lakes, he
advanced with his legion of about three thousand well-disciplined troops
to the Maumee Valley and built Fort Defiance. Final battle was given to
the tribesmen on the twentieth of August at Fallen Timbers. As the
result of superb charges by infantry and cavalry, in forty minutes the
Indian army was defeated and scattered. The backbone of savage
opposition to Northwestern settlement was broken, and at the treaty of
Greenville in the following summer (1795) a peace was secured which
remained unbroken for fifteen years.
Wayne's great victory over the men of the wilderness gave new heart to
Kentucky and the Northwest. The pioneers were exuberant in the
expression of their joy. The long war, which had lasted practically
since the mountains were first crossed by Boone and Finley, had been an
almost constant strain upon the resources of the country. Now no longer
pent up within palisades, and expecting nightly to be awakened by the
whoops of savages to meet either slaughter or still more dreaded
captivity, men could go forth without fear to open up forests, to
cultivate fields, and peaceably to pursue the chase.
To hunters like Boone, in particular, this great change in their lives
was a matter for rejoicing. The Kanawha Valley was not as rich in game
as he had hoped; but in Kentucky and Ohio were still large herds of
buffaloes and deer feeding on the cane-brake and the rank vegetation of
the woods, and resorting to the numerous salt-licks which had as yet
been uncontaminated by settlement.
After the peace, Boone for several seasons devoted himself almost
exclusively to hunting; in beaver-trapping he was especially
successful, his favorite haunt for these animals being the neighboring
Valley of the Gauley. His game he shared freely with neighbors, now fast
increasing in numbers, and the skins and furs were shipped to market,
overland or by river, as of old.
Upon removing to the Kanawha, he still had a few claims left in
Kentucky, but suits for ejectment were pending over most of these. They
were all decided against him, and the remaining lands were sold by the
sheriff for taxes, the last of them going in 1798. His failure to secure
anything for his children to inherit, was to the last a source of sorrow
to Boone.
The Kanawha in time came to be distasteful to him. Settlements above and
below were driving away the game, and sometimes his bag was slight; the
crowding of population disturbed the serenity which he sought in deep
forests; the nervous energy of these newcomers, and the avarice of some
of them, annoyed his quiet, hospitable soul; and he fretted to be again
free, thinking that civilization cost too much in wear and tear of
spirit.
Boone had long looked kindly toward the broad, practically unoccupied
lands of forest and plain west of the Mississippi. Adventurous hunters
brought him glowing tales of buffaloes, grizzly bears, and beavers to be
found there without number. Spain, fearing an assault upon her
possessions from Canada, was just now making flattering offers to those
American pioneers who should colonize her territory, and by casting
their fortunes with her people strengthen them. This opportunity
attracted the disappointed man; he thought the time ripe for making a
move which should leave the crowd far behind, and comfortably establish
him in a country wherein a hunter might, for many years to come, breathe
fresh air and follow the chase untrammeled.
In 1796, Daniel Morgan Boone, his oldest son, traveled with other
adventurers in boats to St. Charles County, in eastern Missouri, where
they took lands under certificates of cession from Charles Dehault
Delassus, the Spanish lieutenant-governor of Upper Louisiana, resident
at St. Louis. There were four families, all settling upon Femme Osage
Creek, six miles above its junction with the Missouri, some twenty-five
miles above the town of St. Charles, and forty-five by water from St.
Louis.
Thither they were followed, apparently in the spring of 1799, by Daniel
Boone and wife and their younger children. The departure of the great
hunter, now in his sixty-fifth year, was the occasion for a general
gathering of Kanawha pioneers at the home near Charleston. They came on
foot, by horseback, and in canoe, from far and near, and bade him a
farewell as solemnly affectionate as though he were departing for
another world; indeed, Missouri then seemed almost as far away to the
West Virginians as the Klondike is to dwellers in the Mississippi basin
to-day--a long journey by packhorse or by flatboat into foreign wilds,
beyond the great waterway concerning which the imaginations of
untraveled men often ran riot.
The hegira of the Boones, from the junction of the Elk and the Kanawha,
was accomplished by boats, into which were crowded such of their scant
herd of live stock as could be accommodated. Upon the way they stopped
at Kentucky towns along the Ohio, either to visit friends or to obtain
provisions, and attracted marked attention, for throughout the West
Boone was, of course, one of the best-known men of his day. In
Cincinnati he was asked why, at his time of life, he left the comforts
of an established home again to subject himself to the privations of the
frontier. "Too crowded!" he replied with feeling. "I want more
elbow-room!"
Arriving at the little Kentucky colony on Femme Osage Creek, where the
Spanish authorities had granted him a thousand arpents[17] of land
abutting his son's estate upon the north, he settled down in a little
log cabin erected largely by his own hands, for the fourth and last time
as a pioneer. He was never again in the Kanawha Valley, and but twice in
Kentucky--once to testify as to some old survey-marks made by him, and
again to pay the debts which he had left when removing to Point
Pleasant.
FOOTNOTE:
[17] Equivalent to about 845 English acres.