BOON AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN'S-LAND,
1769-1774.
The American backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass
trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent
beyond. The peoples threatened by them were dimly conscious of the
danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. Far off, among their
quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the
slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the
tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power
that was to overwhelm their children and successors; but nearer by,
Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algonquin and Appalachian, were all
uneasy as they began to feel the first faint pressure of the American
advance.
As yet they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like
an unrent mantle. All through the mountains, and far beyond, it
stretched without a break; but towards the mouth of the Kentucky and
Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of
woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of
long grass. This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the
debatable ground between the northern and the southern Indians. Neither
dared dwell therein,[1] but both used it as their hunting-grounds; and
it was traversed from end to end by the well marked war traces[2] which
they followed when they invaded each other's territory. The whites, on
trying to break through the barrier which hemmed them in from the
western lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing along the line of
least resistance; and so their first great advance was made in this
debatable land, where the uncertainly defined hunting-grounds of the
Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon those of northern Algonquin
and Wyandot.
Unknown and unnamed hunters and Indian traders had from time to time
pushed some little way into the wilderness; and they had been followed
by others of whom we do indeed know the names, but little more. One
explorer had found and named the Cumberland river and mountains, and the
great pass called Cumberland Gap.[3] Others had gone far beyond the
utmost limits this man had reached, and had hunted in the great bend of
the Cumberland and in the woodland region of Kentucky, famed amongst the
Indians for the abundance of the game.[4] But their accounts excited no
more than a passing interest; they came and went without comment, as
lonely stragglers had come and gone for nearly a century. The backwoods
civilization crept slowly westward without being influenced in its
movements by their explorations.[5]
Finally, however, among these hunters one arose whose wanderings were to
bear fruit; who was destined to lead through the wilderness the first
body of settlers that ever established a community in the far west,
completely cut off from the seaboard colonies. This was Daniel Boon. He
was born in Pennsylvania in 1734,[6] but when only a boy had been
brought with the rest of his family to the banks of the Yadkin in North
Carolina. Here he grew up, and as soon as he came of age he married,
built a log hut, and made a clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of
his backwoods neighbors. They all tilled their own clearings, guiding
the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees were chopped down
and the land burned over, and they were all, as a matter of course,
hunters. With Boon hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely
life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence
for which he really cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes
like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of
his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of
any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the
end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often
portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never
blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong,
and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable
resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His
self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and,
in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources,
all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of
which he was so fond.
Boon hunted on the western waters at an early date. In the valley of
Boon's Creek, a tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech tree still
standing, on which can be faintly traced an inscription setting forth
that "D. Boon cilled a bar on (this) tree in the year 1760."[7] On the
expeditions of which this is the earliest record he was partly hunting
on his own account, and partly exploring on behalf of another, Richard
Henderson. Henderson was a prominent citizen of North Carolina,[8] a
speculative man of great ambition and energy. He stood high in the
colony, was extravagant and fond of display, and his fortune being
jeopardized he hoped to more than retrieve it by going into speculations
in western lands on an unheard of scale; for he intended to try to
establish on his own account a great proprietary colony beyond the
mountains. He had great confidence in Boon; and it was his backing which
enabled the latter to turn his discoveries to such good account.
Boon's claim to distinction rests not so much on his wide wanderings in
unknown lands, for in this respect he did little more than was done by a
hundred other backwoods hunters of his generation, but on the fact that
he was able to turn his daring woodcraft to the advantage of his
fellows. As he himself said, he was an instrument "ordained of God to
settle the wilderness." He inspired confidence in all who met him,[9] so
that the men of means and influence were willing to trust adventurous
enterprises to his care; and his success as an explorer, his skill as a
hunter, and his prowess as an Indian fighter, enabled him to bring these
enterprises to a successful conclusion, and in some degree to control
the wild spirits associated with him.
Boon's expeditions into the edges of the wilderness whetted his appetite
for the unknown. He had heard of great hunting-grounds in the far
interior from a stray hunter and Indian trader,[10] who had himself seen
them, and on May 1, 1769, he left his home on the Yadkin "to wander
through the wilderness of America in quest of the country of
Kentucky."[11] He was accompanied by five other men, including his
informant, and struck out towards the northwest, through the tangled
mass of rugged mountains and gloomy forests. During five weeks of severe
toil the little band journeyed through vast solitudes, whose utter
loneliness can with difficulty be understood by those who have not
themselves dwelt and hunted in primaeval mountain forests. Then, early in
June, the adventurers broke through the interminable wastes of dim
woodland, and stood on the threshold of the beautiful blue-grass region
of Kentucky; a land of running waters, of groves and glades, of
prairies, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forest. It was teeming
with game. The shaggy-maned herds of unwieldy buffalo--the bison as they
should be called--had beaten out broad roads through the forest, and had
furrowed the prairies with trails along which they had travelled for
countless generations. The round-horned elk, with spreading, massive
antlers, the lordliest of the deer tribe throughout the world, abounded,
and like the buffalo travelled in bands not only through the woods but
also across the reaches of waving grass land. The deer were
extraordinarily numerous, and so were bears, while wolves and panthers
were plentiful.
Wherever there was a salt spring the country was fairly thronged with
wild beasts of many kinds. For six months Boon and his companions
enjoyed such hunting as had hardly fallen to men of their race since the
Germans came out of the Hercynian forest.[12]
In December, however, they were attacked by Indians. Boon and a
companion were captured; and when they escaped they found their camp
broken up, and the rest of the party scattered and gone home. About this
time they were joined by Squire Boon, the brother of the great hunter,
and himself a woodsman of but little less skill, together with another
adventurer; the two had travelled through the immense wilderness, partly
to explore it and partly with the hope of finding the original
adventurers, which they finally succeeded in doing more by good luck
than design. Soon afterwards Boon's companion in his first short
captivity was again surprised by the Indians, and this time was
slain[13]--the first of the thousands of human beings with whose
life-blood Kentucky was bought. The attack was entirely unprovoked. The
Indians had wantonly shed the first blood. The land belonged to no one
tribe, but was hunted over by all, each feeling jealous of every other
intruder; they attacked the whites, not because the whites had wronged
them, but because their invariable policy was to kill any strangers on
any grounds over which they themselves ever hunted, no matter what man
had the best right thereto. The Kentucky hunters were promptly taught
that in this no-man's-land, teeming with game and lacking even a
solitary human habitation, every Indian must be regarded as a foe.
The man who had accompanied Squire Boon was terrified by the presence of
the Indians, and now returned to the settlements. The two brothers
remained alone on their hunting-grounds throughout the winter, living in
a little cabin. About the first of May Squire set off alone to the
settlements to procure horses and ammunition. For three months Daniel
Boon remained absolutely alone in the wilderness, without salt, sugar,
or flour, and without the companionship of so much as a horse or a
dog.[14] But the solitude-loving hunter, dauntless and self-reliant,
enjoyed to the full his wild, lonely life; he passed his days hunting
and exploring, wandering hither and thither over the country, while at
night he lay off in the canebrakes or thickets, without a fire, so as
not to attract the Indians. Of the latter he saw many signs, and they
sometimes came to his camp, but his sleepless wariness enabled him to
avoid capture. Late in July his brother returned, and met him according
to appointment at the old camp. Other hunters also now came into the
Kentucky wilderness, and Boon joined a small party of them for a short
time. Such a party of hunters is always glad to have any thing wherewith
to break the irksome monotony of the long evenings passed round the camp
fire; and a book or a greasy pack of cards was as welcome in a camp of
Kentucky riflemen in 1770 as it is to a party of Rocky Mountain hunters
in 1888. Boon has recorded in his own quaint phraseology an incident of
his life during this summer, which shows how eagerly such a little band
of frontiersmen read a book, and how real its characters became to their
minds. He was encamped with five other men on Red River, and they had
with them for their "amusement the history of Samuel Gulliver's travels,
wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing
[sic] him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud." In the
party who, amid such strange surroundings, read and listened to Dean
Swift's writings was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he
came into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnese village be
had found on a creek running into the river; and he announced to the
circle of grim wilderness veterans that "he had been that day to
Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital." To this day
the creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is known
as Lulbegrud Creek.[15]
Soon after this encounter the increasing danger from the Indians drove
Boon back to the valley of the Cumberland River, and in the spring of
1771 he returned to his home on the Yadkin.
A couple of years before Boon went to Kentucky, Steiner, or Stoner, and
Harrod, two hunters from Pittsburg, who had passed through the Illinois,
came down to hunt in the bend of the Cumberland, where Nashville now
stands; they found vast numbers of buffalo, and killed a great many,
especially around the licks, where the huge clumsy beasts had fairly
destroyed most of the forest, treading down the young trees and bushes
till the ground was left bare or covered with a rich growth of clover.
The bottoms and the hollows between the hills were thickset with cane.
Sycamore grew in the low ground, and towards the Mississippi were to be
found the persimmon and cottonwood. Sometimes the forest was open and
composed of huge trees; elsewhere it was of thicker, smaller growth.[16]
Everywhere game abounded, and it was nowhere very wary. Other hunters of
whom we know even the names of only a few, had been through many parts
of the wilderness before Boon, and earlier still Frenchmen had built
forts and smelting furnaces on the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the
head tributaries of the Kentucky.[17] Boon is interesting as a leader
and explorer; but he is still more interesting as a type. The west was
neither discovered, won, nor settled by any single man. No keen-eyed
statesman planned the movement, nor was it carried out by any great
military leader; it was the work of a whole people, of whom each man was
impelled mainly by sheer love of adventure; it was the outcome of the
ceaseless strivings of all the dauntless, restless backwoods folk to win
homes for their descendants and to each penetrate deeper than his
neighbors into the remote forest hunting-grounds where the perilous
pleasures of the chase and of war could be best enjoyed. We owe the
conquest of the west to all the backwoodsmen, not to any solitary
individual among them; where all alike were strong and daring there was
no chance for any single man to rise to unquestioned preeminence.
In the summer of 1769 a large band of hunters[18] crossed the mountains
to make a long hunt in the western wilderness, the men clad in
hunting-shirts, moccasins, and leggings, with traps, rifles, and dogs,
and each bringing with him two or three horses. They made their way over
the mountains, forded or swam the rapid, timber-choked streams, and went
down the Cumberland, till at last they broke out of the forest and came
upon great barrens of tall grass. One of their number was killed by a
small party of Indians; but they saw no signs of human habitations. Yet
they came across mounds and graves and other remains of an ancient
people who had once lived in the land, but had died out of it long ages
before the incoming of the white men.[19]
The hunters made a permanent camp in one place, and returned to it at
intervals to deposit their skins and peltries. Between times they
scattered out singly or in small bands. They hunted all through the
year, killing vast quantities of every kind of game. Most of it they got
by fair still-hunting, but some by methods we do not now consider
legitimate, such as calling up a doe by imitating the bleat of a fawn,
and shooting deer from a scaffold when they came to the salt licks at
night. Nevertheless, most of the hunters did not approve of "crusting"
the game--that is, of running it down on snow-shoes in the deep
mid-winter snows.
At the end of the year some of the adventurers returned home; others[20]
went north into the Kentucky country, where they hunted for several
months before recrossing the mountains; while the remainder, led by an
old hunter named Kasper Mansker,[21] built two boats and hollowed out of
logs two pirogues or dugouts--clumsier but tougher craft than the light
birch-bark canoes--and started down the Cumberland. At the French Lick,
where Nashville now stands, they saw enormous quantities of buffalo,
elk, and other game, more than they had ever seen before in any one
place. Some of their goods were taken by a party of Indians they met,
but some French traders whom they likewise encountered, treated them
well and gave them salt, flour, tobacco, and taffia, the last being
especially prized, as they had had no spirits for a year. They went down
to Natchez, sold their furs, hides, oil, and tallow, and some returned
by sea, while others, including Mansker, came overland with a drove of
horses that was being taken through the Indian nations to Georgia. From
the length of time all these men, as well as Boon and his companions,
were absent, they were known as the Long Hunters, and the fame of their
hunting and exploring spread all along the border and greatly excited
the young men.[22]
In 1771 many hunters crossed over the mountains and penetrated far into
the wilderness, to work huge havoc among the herds of game. Some of them
came in bands, and others singly, and many of the mountains, lakes,
rivers, and creeks of Tennessee are either called after the leaders
among these old hunters and wanderers, or else by their names perpetuate
the memory of some incident of their hunting trips.[23]
Mansker himself came back, a leader among his comrades, and hunted many
years in the woods alone or with others of his kind, and saw and did
many strange things. One winter he and those who were with him built a
skin house from the hides of game, and when their ammunition gave out
they left three of their number and all of their dogs at the skin house
and went to the settlements for powder and lead. When they returned they
found that two of the men had been killed and the other chased away by
the Indians, who, however, had not found the camp. The dogs, having seen
no human face for three months, were very wild, yet in a few days became
as tame and well trained as ever. They killed such enormous quantities
of buffalo, elk, and especially deer, that they could not pack the hides
into camp, and one of the party, during an idle moment and in a spirit
of protest against fate,[24] carved on the peeled trunk of a fallen
poplar, where it long remained, the sentence: "2300 deer skins lost;
ruination by God!" The soul of this thrifty hunter must have been
further grieved when a party of Cherokees visited their camp and took
away all the camp utensils and five hundred hides. The whites found the
broad track they made in coming in, but could not find where they had
gone out, each wily redskin then covering his own trail, and the whole
number apparently breaking up into several parties.
Sometimes the Indians not only plundered the hunting camps but killed
the hunters as well, and the hunters retaliated in kind. Often the white
men and red fought one another whenever they met, and displayed in their
conflicts all the cunning and merciless ferocity that made forest
warfare so dreadful. Terrible deeds of prowess were done by the mighty
men on either side. It was a war of stealth and cruelty, and ceaseless,
sleepless watchfulness. The contestants had sinewy frames and iron
wills, keen eyes and steady hands, hearts as bold as they were ruthless.
Their moccasined feet made no sound as they stole softly on the camp of
a sleeping enemy or crept to ambush him while he himself still-hunted or
waylaid the deer. A favorite stratagem was to imitate the call of game,
especially the gobble of the wild turkey, and thus to lure the would-be
hunter to his fate. If the deceit was guessed at, the caller was himself
stalked. The men grew wonderfully expert in detecting imitation. One old
hunter, Castleman by name, was in after years fond of describing how an
Indian nearly lured him to his death. It was in the dusk of the evening,
when he heard the cries of two great wood owls near him. Listening
attentively, he became convinced that all was not right. "The woo-woo
call and the woo-woo answer were not well timed and toned, and the
babel-chatter was a failure. More than this, they seemed to be on the
ground." Creeping cautiously up, and peering through the brush, he saw
something the height of a stump between two forked trees. It did not
look natural; he aimed, pulled trigger, and killed an Indian.
Each party of Indians or whites was ever on the watch to guard against
danger or to get the chance of taking vengeance for former wrongs. The
dark woods saw a myriad lonely fights where red warrior or white hunter
fell and no friend of the fallen ever knew his fate, where his sole
memorial was the scalp that hung in the smoky cabin or squalid wigwam of
the victor.
The rude and fragmentary annals of the frontier are filled with the
deeds of men, of whom Mansker can be taken as a type. He was a wonderful
marksman and woodsman, and was afterwards made a colonel of the frontier
militia, though, being of German descent, he spoke only broken
English.[25] Like most of the hunters he became specially proud of his
rifle, calling it "Nancy"; for they were very apt to know each his
favorite weapon by some homely or endearing nickname. Every forest sight
or sound was familiar to him. He knew the cries of the birds and beasts
so well that no imitation could deceive him. Once he was nearly taken in
by an unusually perfect imitation of a wild gobbler; but he finally
became suspicious, and "placed" his adversary behind a large tree.
Having perfect confidence in his rifle, and knowing that the Indians
rarely fired except at close range--partly because they were poor shots,
partly because they loaded their guns too lightly--he made no attempt to
hide. Feigning to pass to the Indian's right, the latter, as he
expected, tried to follow him; reaching an opening in a glade, Mansker
suddenly wheeled and killed his foe. When hunting he made his home
sometimes in a hollow tree, sometimes in a hut of buffalo hides; for the
buffalo were so plenty that once when a lick was discovered by himself
and a companion,[26] the latter, though on horseback, was nearly
trampled to death by the mad rush of a herd they surprised and
stampeded.
He was a famous Indian fighter; one of the earliest of his recorded
deeds has to do with an Indian adventure. He and three other men were
trapping on Sulphur Fork and Red River, in the great bend of the
Cumberland. Moving their camp, they came on recent traces of Indians:
deer-carcases and wicker frames for stretching hides. They feared to
tarry longer unless they knew something of their foes, and Mansker set
forth to explore, and turned towards Red River, where, from the sign, he
thought to find the camp. Travelling some twenty miles, he perceived by
the sycamore trees in view that he was near the river. Advancing a few
steps farther he suddenly found himself within eighty or ninety yards of
the camp. He instantly slipped behind a tree to watch. There were only
two Indians in camp; the rest he supposed were hunting at a distance.
Just as he was about to retire, one of the Indians took up a tomahawk
and strolled off in the opposite direction; while the other picked up
his gun, put it on his shoulder, and walked directly towards Mansker's
hiding-place. Mansker lay close, hoping that he would not be noticed;
but the Indian advanced directly towards him until not fifteen paces
off. There being no alternative, Mansker cocked his piece, and shot the
Indian through the body. The Indian screamed, threw down his gun, and
ran towards camp; passing it he pitched headlong down the bluff, dead,
into the river. The other likewise ran to camp at the sound of the shot;
but Mansker outran him, reached the camp first, and picked up an old gun
that was on the ground; but the gun would not go off, and the Indian
turned and escaped. Mansker broke the old gun, and returned speedily to
his comrades. The next day they all went to the spot, where they found
the dead Indian and took away his tomahawk, knife, and bullet-bag; but
they never found his gun. The other Indian had come back, had loaded his
horses with furs, and was gone. They followed him all that day and all
night with a torch of dry cane, and could never overtake him. Finding
that there were other bands of Indians about, they then left their
hunting grounds. Towards the close of his life old Mansker, like many
another fearless and ignorant backwoods fighter, became so much
impressed by the fiery earnestness and zeal of the Methodists that he
joined himself to them, and became a strong and helpful prop of the
community whose first foundations he had helped to lay.
Sometimes the hunters met Creole trappers, who sent their tallow, hides,
and furs in pirogues and bateaux down the Mississippi to Natchez or
Orleans, instead of having to transport them on pack-horses through the
perilous forest-tracks across the mountains. They had to encounter
dangers from beasts as well as men. More than once we hear of one who,
in a canebrake or tangled thicket, was mangled to death by the horns and
hoofs of a wounded buffalo.[27] All of the wild beasts were then
comparatively unused to contact with rifle-bearing hunters; they were,
in consequence, much more ferocious and ready to attack man than at
present. The bear were the most numerous of all, after the deer; their
chase was a favorite sport. There was just enough danger in it to make
it exciting, for though hunters were frequently bitten or clawed, they
were hardly ever killed. The wolves were generally very wary; yet in
rare instances they, too, were dangerous. The panther was a much more
dreaded foe, and lives were sometimes lost in hunting him; but even with
the panther, the cases where the hunter was killed were very
exceptional.
The hunters were in their lives sometimes clean and straight, and
sometimes immoral, with a gross and uncouth viciousness. We read of one
party of six men and a woman, who were encountered on the Cumberland
River; the woman acted as the wife of a man named Big John, but deserted
him for one of his companions, and when he fell sick persuaded the whole
party to leave him in the wilderness to die of disease and starvation.
Yet those who left him did not in the end fare better, for they were
ambushed and cut off, when they had gone down to Natchez, apparently by
Indians.
At first the hunters, with their small-bore rifles, were unsuccessful in
killing buffalo. Once, when George Rogers Clark had long resided in
Kentucky, he and two companions discovered a camp of some forty
new-comers actually starving, though buffalo were plenty. Clark and his
friends speedily relieved their necessities by killing fourteen of the
great beasts; for when once the hunters had found out the knack, the
buffalo were easier slaughtered than any other game.[28]
The hunters were the pioneers; but close behind them came another set of
explorers quite as hardy and resolute. These were the surveyors. The men
of chain and compass played a part in the exploration of the west
scarcely inferior to that of the heroes of axe and rifle. Often, indeed,
the parts were combined; Boon himself was a surveyor.[29] Vast tracts of
western land were continually being allotted either to actual settlers
or as bounties to soldiers who had served against the French and
Indians. These had to be explored and mapped and as there was much risk
as well as reward in the task, it naturally proved attractive to all
adventurous young men who had some education, a good deal of ambition,
and not too much fortune. A great number of young men of good families,
like Washington and Clark, went into the business. Soon after the return
of Boon and the Long Hunters, parties of surveyors came down the
Ohio,[30] mapping out its course and exploring the Kentucky lands that
lay beside it.[31]
Among the hunters, surveyors, and explorers who came into the wilderness
in 1773 was a band led by three young men named McAfee,--typical
backwoodsmen, hardy, adventurous, their frontier recklessness and
license tempered by the Calvinism they had learned in their rough log
home. They were fond of hunting, but they came to spy out the land and
see if it could be made into homes for their children; and in their
party were several surveyors. They descended the Ohio in dugout canoes,
with their rifles, blankets, tomahawks, and fishing-tackle. They met
some Shawnees and got on well with them; but while their leader was
visiting the chief, Cornstalk, and listening to his fair speeches at his
town of Old Chilicothe, the rest of the party were startled to see a
band of young Shawnee braves returning from a successful foray on the
settlements, driving before them the laden pack-horses they had
stolen.[32]
They explored part of Kentucky, and visited the different licks. One,
long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about
it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon;
the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge
fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit.
Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of
buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight
at once. The ground round about some of them was trodden down so that
there was not as much grass left as would feed a sheep; and the game
trails were like streets, or the beaten roads round a city. A little
village to this day recalls by its name the fact that it stands on a
former "stamping ground" of the buffalo. At one lick the explorers met
with what might have proved a serious adventure. One of the McAfees and
a companion were passing round its outskirts, when some others of the
party fired at a gang of buffaloes, which stampeded directly towards the
two. While his companion scampered up a leaning mulberry bush, McAfee,
less agile, leaped behind a tree trunk, where he stood sideways till the
buffalo passed, their horns scraping off the bark on either side; then
he looked round to see his friend "hanging in the mulberry bush like a
coon."[33]
When the party left this lick they followed a buffalo trail, beaten out
in the forest, "the size of the wagon road leading out of Williamsburg,"
then the capital of Virginia. It crossed the Kentucky River at a riffle
below where Frankfort now stands. Thence they started homewards across
the Cumberland Mountains, and suffered terribly while making their way
through the "desolate and voiceless solitudes"; mere wastes of cliffs,
crags, caverns, and steep hillsides covered with pine, laurel, and
underbrush. Twice they were literally starving and were saved in the
nick of time by the killing, on the first occasion, of a big bull elk,
on the next, of a small spike buck. At last, sun-scorched and
rain-beaten, foot-sore and leg-weary, their thighs torn to pieces by the
stout briars,[34] and their feet and hands blistered and scalded, they
came out in Powell's Valley, and followed the well-worn hunter's trail
across it. Thence it was easy to reach home, where the tale of their
adventures excited still more the young frontiersmen.
Their troubles were ended for the time being; but in Powell's Valley
they met other wanderers whose toil and peril had just begun. There they
encountered the company[35] which Daniel Boon was just leading across
the mountains, with the hope of making a permanent settlement in far
distant Kentucky.[36] Boon had sold his farm on the Yadkin and all the
goods he could not carry with him, and in September, 1773, he started
for Kentucky with his wife and his children; five families, and forty
men besides, went with him, driving their horses and cattle. It was the
first attempt that was made to settle a region separated by long
stretches of wilderness from the already inhabited districts; and it was
doomed to failure. On approaching the gloomy and forbidding defiles of
the Cumberland Mountains the party was attacked by Indians.[37] Six of
the men, including Boon's eldest son, were slain, and the cattle
scattered; and though the backwoodsmen rallied and repulsed their
assailants, yet they had suffered such loss and damage that they
retreated and took up their abode temporarily on the Clinch River.
In the same year Simon Kenton, afterwards famous as a scout and Indian
fighter, in company with other hunters, wandered through Kentucky.
Kenton, like every one else, was astounded at the beauty and fertility
of the land and the innumerable herds of buffalo, elk, and other game
that thronged the trampled ground around the licks. One of his
companions was taken by the Indians, who burned him alive.
In the following year numerous parties of surveyors visited the land.
One of these was headed by John Floyd, who was among the ablest of the
Kentucky pioneers, and afterwards played a prominent part in the young
commonwealth, until his death at the hands of the savages. Floyd was at
the time assistant surveyor of Fincastle County; and his party went out
for the purpose of making surveys "by virtue of the Governor's warrant
for officers and soldiers on the Ohio and its waters."[38]
They started on April 9, 1774,--eight men in all,--from their homes in
Fincastle County.[39] They went down the Kanawha in a canoe, shooting
bear and deer, and catching great pike and catfish. The first survey
they made was one of two thousand acres for "Colo. Washington"; and they
made another for Patrick Henry. On the way they encountered other
parties of surveyors, and learned that an Indian war was threatened; for
a party of thirteen would-be settlers on the upper Ohio had been
attacked, but had repelled their assailants, and in consequence the
Shawnees had declared for war, and threatened thereafter to kill the
Virginians and rob the Pennsylvanians wherever they found them.[40] The
reason for this discrimination in favor of the citizens of the Quaker
State was that the Virginians with whom the Indians came chiefly in
contact were settlers, whereas the Pennsylvanians were traders. The
marked difference in the way the savages looked at the two classes
received additional emphasis in Lord Dunmore's war.
At the mouth of the Kanawha[41] the adventurers found twenty or thirty
men gathered together; some had come to settle, but most wished to
explore or survey the lands. All were in high spirits, and resolute to
go to Kentucky, in spite of Indian hostilities. Some of them joined
Floyd, and raised his party to eighteen men, who started down the Ohio
in four canoes.[42] They found "a battoe loaded with corn," apparently
abandoned, and took about three bushels with them. Other parties joined
them from time to time, as they paddled and drifted down stream; and one
or two of their own number, alarmed by further news of Indian
hostilities, went back. Once they met a party of Delawares, by whom they
were not molested; and again, two or three of their number encountered a
couple of hostile savages; and though no one was hurt, the party were
kept on the watch all the time. They marvelled much at the great
trees--one sycamore was thirty-seven feet in circumference,--and on a
Sunday, which they kept as a day of rest, they examined with interest
the forest-covered embankments of a fort at the mouth of the Scioto, a
memorial of the mound-builders who had vanished centuries before.
When they reached the mouth of the Kentucky[43] they found two Delawares
and a squaw, to whom they gave corn and salt. Here they split up, and
Floyd and his original party spent a week in the neighborhood, surveying
land, going some distance up the Kentucky to a salt lick, where they saw
a herd of three hundred buffalo.[44] They then again embarked, and
drifted down the Ohio. On May 26th they met two Delawares in a canoe
flying a red flag; they had been sent down the river with a pass from
the commandant at Fort Pitt to gather their hunters and get them home,
in view of the threatened hostilities between the Shawnees and
Virginians.[45] The actions of the two Indians were so suspicious, and
the news they brought was so alarming, that some of Floyd's companions
became greatly alarmed, and wished to go straight on down the
Mississippi; but Floyd swore that he would finish his work unless
actually forced off. Three days afterwards they reached the Falls.
Here Floyd spent a fortnight, making surveys in every direction, and
then started off to explore the land between the Salt River and the
Kentucky. Like the others, he carried his own pack, which consisted of
little but his blanket and his instruments. He sometimes had
difficulties with his men; one of them refused to carry the chain one
day, and went off to hunt, got lost, and was not found for thirty-six
hours. Another time it was noticed that two of the hunters had become
sullen, and seemed anxious to leave camp. The following morning, while
on the march, the party killed an elk and halted for breakfast; but the
two hunters walked on, and, says the journal, "we never saw them more";
but whether they got back to the settlements or perished in the
wilderness, none could tell.
The party suffered much hardship. Floyd fell sick, and for three days
could not travel. They gave him an "Indian sweat," probably building
just such a little sweat-house as the Indians use to this day. Others of
their number at different times fell ill; and they were ever on the
watch for Indians. In the vast forests, every sign of a human being was
the sign of a probable enemy. Once they heard a gun, and another time a
sound as of a man calling to another; and on each occasion they
redoubled their caution, keeping guard as they rested, and at night
extinguishing their camp-fire and sleeping a mile or two from it.
They built a bark canoe in which to cross the Kentucky, and on the 1st
of July they met another party of surveyors on the banks of that
stream.[46] Two or three days afterwards, Floyd and three companions
left the others, agreeing to meet them on August 1st, at a cabin built
by a man named Harwood, on the south side of the Kentucky, a few miles
from the mouth of the Elkhorn. For three weeks they surveyed and hunted,
enchanted with the beauty of the country.[47] They then went to the
cabin, several days before the appointed time; but to their surprise
found every thing scattered over the ground, and two fires burning,
while on a tree near the landing was written, "Alarmed by finding some
people killed and we are gone down." This left the four adventurers in a
bad plight, as they had but fifteen rounds of powder left, and none of
them knew the way home. However there was no help for it, and they
started off.[48] When they came to the mountains they found it such hard
going that they were obliged to throw away their blankets and every
thing else except their rifles, hunting-shirts, leggings, and moccasins.
Like the other parties of returning explorers, they found this portion
of their journey extremely distressing; and they suffered much from sore
feet, and also from want of food, until they came on a gang of
buffaloes, and killed two. At last they struck Cumberland Gap, followed
a blazed trail across it to Powell's Valley, and on August 9th came to
the outlying settlements on Clinch River, where they found the settlers
all in their wooden forts, because of the war with the Shawnees.[49]
In this same year many different bodies of hunters and surveyors came
into the country, drifting down the Ohio in pirogues. Some forty men led
by Harrod and Sowdowsky[50] founded Harrodsburg, where they built cabins
and sowed corn; but the Indians killed one of their number, and the rest
dispersed. Some returned across the mountains; but Sowdowsky and another
went through the woods to the Cumberland River, where they built a
canoe, paddled down the muddy Mississippi between unending reaches of
lonely marsh and forest, and from New Orleans took ship to Virginia.
At that time, among other parties of surveyors there was one which had
been sent by Lord Dunmore to the Falls of the Ohio. When the war broke
out between the Shawnees and the Virginians, Lord Dunmore, being very
anxious for the fate of these surveyors, sent Boon and Stoner to pilot
them in; which the two bush veterans accordingly did, making the round
trip of 800 miles in 64 days. The outbreak of the Indian war caused all
the hunters and surveyors to leave Kentucky; and at the end of 1774
there were no whites left, either there or in what is now middle
Tennessee. But on the frontier all men's eyes were turned towards these
new and fertile regions. The pioneer work of the hunter was over, and
that of the axe-bearing settler was about to begin.
1. This is true as a whole; but along the Mississippi, in the extreme
west of the present Kentucky and Tennessee, the Chickasaws held
possession. There was a Shawnee town south of the Ohio, and Cherokee
villages in southeastern Tennessee.
2. The backwoodsmen generally used "trace," where western frontiersmen
would now say "trail."
3. Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia. He named them after the Duke of
Cumberland. Walker was a genuine explorer and surveyor, a man of mark as
a pioneer. The journal of his trip across the Cumberland to the
headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750 has been preserved, and has just been
published by William Cabell Rives (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.). It is
very interesting, and Mr. Rives has done a real service in publishing
it. Walker and five companions were absent six months. He found traces
of earlier wanderers--probably hunters. One of his companions was bitten
by a bear; three of the dogs were wounded by bears, and one killed by an
elk; the horses were frequently bitten by rattlesnakes; once a
bull-buffalo threatened the whole party. They killed 13 buffaloes, 8
elks, 53 bears, 20 deer, 150 turkeys and some other game.
4. Hunters and Indian traders visited portions of Kentucky and Tennessee
years before the country became generally known even on the border. (Not
to speak of the French, who had long known something of the country
where they had even made trading posts and built furnaces, as see
Haywood, etc.) We know the names of a few. Those who went down the Ohio,
merely landing on the Kentucky shore, do not deserve mention; the French
had done as much for a century. Whites who had been captured by the
Indians, were sometimes taken through Tennessee or Kentucky, as John
Salling in 1730 and Mrs. Mary Inglis in 1756 (see "Trans-Alleghany
Pioneers," Collis, etc.). In 1654 a certain Colonel Wood was in
Kentucky. The next real explorer was nearly a century later, though
Doherty in 1690, and Adair in 1730, traded with the Cherokees in what is
now Tennessee. Walker struck the head-water of the Kentucky in 1750; he
had been to the Cumberland in 1748. He made other exploring trips.
Christopher Gist went up the Kentucky in 1751. In 1756 and 1758 Forts
Loudon and Chisset were built on the Tennessee head-waters, but were
soon afterwards destroyed by the Cherokees. In 1761, '62, '63 and for a
year or two afterwards a party of hunters under the lead of one Wallen
hunted on the western waters, going continually farther west. In 1765
Croghan made a sketch of the Ohio River. In 1766 James Smith and others
explored Tennessee. Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay, and a party from South
Carolina were near the present site of Nashville in 1767, in the same
year John Finley and others were in Kentucky, and it was Finley who
first told Boon about it and led him thither.
5. The attempt to find out the names of the men who first saw the
different portions of the western country is not very profitable. The
first visitors were hunters, simply wandering in search of game, not
with any settled purpose of exploration. Who the individual first-comers
were, has generally been forgotten. At the most it is only possible to
find out the name of some one of several who went to a given locality.
The hunters were wandering everywhere. By chance some went to places we
now consider important. By chance the names of a few of these have been
preserved. But the credit belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to
the individual backwoodsman.
6. August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boon).
His grandfather was an English immigrant; his father had married a
Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country was
still a wilderness. He was born in Berks Co.
7. The inscription is first mentioned by Ramsey, p. 67. See Appendix C,
for a letter from the Hon. John Allison, at present (1888) Secretary of
State for Tennessee, which goes to prove that the inscription has been
on the tree as long as the district has been settled. Of course it
cannot be proved that the inscription is by Boon; but there is much
reason for supposing that such is the case, and little for doubting it.
8. He was by birth a Virginian, of mixed Scotch and Welsh descent. See
Collins, II., 336; also Ramsey. For Boon's early connection with
Henderson, in 1764, see Haywood, 35.
9. Even among his foes; he is almost the only American praised by
Lt.-Gov. Henry Hamilton of Detroit, for instance (see _Royal
Gazette_, July 15, 1780).
10. John Finley.
11. "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter";
nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John
Filson, the first Kentucky historian,--a man who did history good
service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old
pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson
used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its
most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" in the
Filson Club Publications.
12. The Nieblung Lied tells of Siegfried's feats with bear, buffalo,
elk, wolf, and deer:
"Danach schlug er wieder einen Buffel und einen Elk
Vier starkes Auer nieder und einen grimmen Schelk,
So schnell trug ihn die Mahre, dasz ihm nichts entsprang;
Hinden und Hirsche wurden viele sein Fang.
....... ein Waldthier furchterlich,
Einen wilden Baren."
Siegfried's elk was our moose; and like the American frontiersmen of
to-day, the old German singer calls the Wisent or Bison a
buffalo--European sportsmen now committing an equally bad blunder by
giving it the name of the extinct aurochs. Be it observed also that the
hard fighting, hard drinking, boastful hero of Nieblung fame used a
"spur hund," just as his representative of Kentucky or Tennessee used a
track hound a thousand years later.
13. His name was John Stewart.
14. His remaining absolutely alone in the wilderness for such a length
of time is often spoken of with wonder; but here again Boon stands
merely as the backwoods type, not as an exception. To this day many
hunters in the Rockies do the same. In 1880, two men whom I knew
wintered to the west of the Bighorns, 150 miles from any human beings.
They had salt and flour, however; but they were nine months without
seeing a white face. They killed elk, buffalo, and a moose; and had a
narrow escape from a small Indian war party. Last winter (1887-88) an
old trapper, a friend of mine in the days when he hunted buffalo, spent
five months entirely alone in the mountains north of the Flathead
country.
15. Deposition of Daniel Boon, September 15, 1796. Certified copy from
Deposition Book No. I, page 156, Clarke County Court, Ky. First
published by Col. John Mason Brown, in "Battle of the Blue Licks," p. 40
(Frankfort, 1882). The book which these old hunters read around their
camp-fire in the Indian-haunted primaeval forest a century and a quarter
ago has by great good-luck been preserved, and is in Col. Durrett's
library at Louisville. It is entitled the "Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift,
London, MDCCLXV," and is in two small volumes. On the title-page is
written "A. Neelly, 1770"
Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the
better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as
any other class of people. In the long winter evenings they study to
good purpose books as varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow,
Parton's "Life of Jackson," and the Rollo stories--to mention only
volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cowboys and
hunters.
16. MS. diary of Benj. Hawkins, 1796. Preserved in Nash. Historical Soc.
In 1796 buffalo were scarce; but some fresh signs of them were still
seen at licks.
17. Haywood, p. 75, etc. It is a waste of time to quarrel over who first
discovered a particular tract of this wilderness. A great many hunters
traversed different parts at different times, from 1760 on, each
practically exploring on his own account. We do not know the names of
most of them; those we do know are only worth preserving in county
histories and the like; the credit belongs to the race, not the
individual.
18. From twenty to forty. Compare Haywood and Marshall, both of whom are
speaking of the same bodies of men; Ramsey makes the mistake of
supposing they are speaking of different parties; Haywood dwells on the
feats of those who descended the Cumberland; Marshall of those who went
to Kentucky.
19. The so-called mound builders; now generally considered to have been
simply the ancestors of the present Indian races.
20. Led by one James Knox.
21. His real name was Kasper Mansker, as his signature shows, but he was
always spoken of as Mansco.
22. McAfee MSS. ("Autobiography of Robt. McAfee"). Sometimes the term
Long Hunters was used as including Boon, Finley, and their companions,
sometimes not; in the McAfee MSS. it is explicitly used in the former
sense.
23. See Haywood for Clinch River, Drake's Pond, Mansco's Lick, Greasy
Rock, etc., etc.
24. A hunter named Bledsoe; Collins, II., 418.
25. Carr's "Early Times in Middle Tennessee," pp. 52, 54, 56, etc.
26. The hunter Bledsoe mentioned in a previous note.
27. As Haywood, 81.
28. This continued to be the case until the buffalo were all destroyed.
When my cattle came to the Little Missouri, in 1882, buffalo were
plenty; my men killed nearly a hundred that winter, though tending the
cattle; yet an inexperienced hunter not far from us, though a hardy
plainsman, killed only three in the whole time. See also Parkman's
"Oregon Trail" for an instance of a party of Missouri backwoodsmen who
made a characteristic failure in an attempt on a buffalo band.
29. See Appendix.
30. An English engineer made a rude survey or table of distances of the
Ohio in 1766.
31. Collins states that in 1770 and 1772 Washington surveyed small
tracts in what is now northeastern Kentucky; but this is more than
doubtful.
32. All of this is taken from the McAfee MSS., in Colonel Durrett's
library.
33. McAfee MSS. A similar adventure befell my brother Elliott and my
cousin John Roosevelt while they were hunting buffalo on the staked
plains of Texas in 1877.
34. They evidently wore breech-clouts and leggings, not trowsers.
35. McAfee MSS.
36. Filson's "Boon."
37. October 10, 1773, Filson's "Boon." The McAfee MSS. speak of meeting
Boon in Powell's Valley and getting home in September; if so, it must
have been the very end of the month.
38. The account of this journey of Floyd and his companions is taken
from a very interesting MS. journal, kept by one of the party--Thomas
Hanson. It was furnished me, together with other valuable papers,
through the courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Trigg, of Abingdon, Va., and
of Dr. George Ben. Johnston, of Richmond, to whom I take this
opportunity of returning my warm thanks.
39. From the house of Col. William Preston, "at one o'clock, in high
spirits." They took the canoe at the mouth of Elk River, on the 16th.
Most of the diary is, of course, taken up with notes on the character
and fertility of the lands, and memoranda of the surveys made. Especial
comment is made on a burning spring by the Kanawha, which is dubbed "one
of the wonders of the world."
40. They received this news on April 17th, and confirmation thereof on
the 19th. The dates should be kept in mind, as they show that the
Shawnees had begun hostilities from a fortnight to a month before
Cresap's attack and the murder of Logan's family, which will be
described hereafter.
41. Which they reached on the 20th.
42. On the 22d.
43. On May 13th.
44. There were quarrels among the surveyors. The entry for May 13th
runs: "Our company divided, eleven men went up to Harrad's company one
hundred miles up the Cantucky or Louisa river (n.b. one Capt. Harrad has
been there many months building a kind of Town &c) in order to make
improvements. This day a quarrel arose between Mr. Lee and Mr. Hyte; Lee
cut a Stick and gave Hyte a Whiping with it, upon which Mr. Floyd
demanded the King's Peace which stopt it sooner that it would have ended
if he had not been there."
45. They said that in a skirmish the whites had killed thirteen
Shawnees, two Mingos, and one Delaware (this may or may not mean the
massacres by Cresap and Greathouse; see, _post_, chapter on Lord
Dunmore's War).
46. Where the journal says the land "is like a paradise, it is so good
and beautiful."
47. The journal for July 8th says: "The Land is so good that I cannot
give it its due Praise. The undergrowth is Clover, Pea-vine, Cane &
Nettles; intermingled with Rich Weed. It's timber is Honey Locust, Black
Walnut, Sugar Tree, Hickory, Iron-Wood, Hoop Wood, Mulberry, Ash and Elm
and some Oak." And later it dwells on the high limestone cliffs facing
the river on both sides.
48. On July 25th.
49. I have given the account of Floyd's journey at some length as
illustrating the experience of a typical party of surveyors. The journal
has never hitherto been alluded to, and my getting hold of it was almost
accidental.
There were three different kinds of explorers. Boon represents the
hunters; the McAfees represent the would-be settlers; and Floyd's
party the surveyors who mapped out the land for owners of land grants.
In 1774, there were parties of each kind in Kentucky. Floyd's
experience shows that these parties were continually meeting others
and splitting up; he started out with eight men, at one time was in a
body with thirty-seven, and returned home with four.
The journal is written in a singularly clear and legible hand,
evidently by a man of good education.
50. The latter, from his name presumably of Sclavonic ancestry, came
originally from New York, always a centre of mixed nationalities. He
founded a most respectable family, some of whom have changed their name
to Sandusky; but there seems to be no justification for their claim that
they gave Sandusky its name, for this is almost certainly a corruption
of its old Algonquin title. "American Pioneer" (Cincinnati, 1843), II.,
p. 325.