Sometimes a single explorer went ahead of the rest with a few friendly
Indians to accompany him. If not he went alone, tramping into the
forest, living in a rough shack, suffering untold hardship through
bitter winter months. For weeks when he had neither meal nor flour he
lived on meat alone--deer and bear. It was the stories of valuable furs
and the vast quantities of them which trickled back to the settlements
that lured others to follow. Hunters and trappers came bringing their
families. The stories of furs and the promise of greater possessions to
be had in the wilderness grew and so did the number of adventurers. They
began to form little settlements and their coming crowded before them
the earlier hunter or trapper who wanted always the field to himself.
In the meantime settlers in the Valley of Virginia were growing more
smug and prosperous. They wanted to invest part of their earnings. They
wanted to set up other undertakings. So they began sending out
expeditions into the wilderness with the intention of trading with the
Indians and possibly of securing lands for settlers.
As early as 1673 young Gabriel Arthur had set out on an expedition for
his master Colonel Abraham Wood of Virginia with a small party. Through
the Valley of Virginia went the young adventurer, taking the
well-defined Warrior's Path; he followed watercourses and gaps that cut
through high mountain walls, down the Holston River through Tennessee,
through the "great gap" into the Cuttawa country. Finally separated from
his companions, the lad lost all count of time. Even if he had had a
calendar tucked away in the pocket of his deerskin coat, however, it
would have done him no good for he could neither read nor write. Weeks
and months passed. Winter came. Finally after many adventures young
Arthur started on the long journey back to Virginia. As he drew near
Colonel Wood's home he heard merriment within and the voice of his
master wishing his household a merry Christmas. Not till then did the
young adventurer know how long he had been away.
With the master and the household and the friends who had gathered to
celebrate and offer thanks at the Yuletide season, with all listening
eagerly, young Gabriel Arthur, though unable to bring back any written
record, told many a stirring tale. A swig of wine may have spurred the
telling of how he had been captured by the Shawnees (in Ohio), of how he
had been surrounded by a wild, shouting tribe who tied him to a stake
and were about to put a flaming torch to his feet when he thought of a
way to save his life. They were charmed with the gun he carried, and the
shiny knife at his belt. If they'd set him free he promised to bring
them many, many knives and guns. Once young Gabriel made his escape he
didn't intend to be caught napping again. He painted his fair face with
wild berry juice, and color from bark and herbs. After much wandering he
found himself with friendly Cherokees in the upper Tennessee Valley.
They were so friendly, in fact, that a couple of them accompanied him on
his return to Virginia. He returned along other watercourses--by way of
the Rockcastle and Kentucky Rivers. He crossed the Big Sandy--the
Indians called it Chatterawha and Totteroy. He got out of their canoe at
a point where the Totteroy flows into the Ohio and stood on the bank and
looked about at the far-off hills. So it was young Gabriel Arthur who
was the first white man to set foot in Kentucky, and that at the mouth
of the Big Sandy.
Young Gabriel's tales traveled far. Soon others, fired with the spirit
of adventure, were turning to the wilderness. Nor was adventure the only
spur. Investors as well as hunters and trappers saw promise of profits
in Far Appalachia. Cartographers were put to work. A glimpse at their
drawings shows interesting and similar observations.
In 1697 Louis Hennepin's map indicated the territory south of the Great
Lakes, including the southern Appalachians and extending as far west as
the Mississippi River and a route which passed through a "gap across the
Appalachians to the Atlantic seaboard." Later the map of a Frenchman
named Delisle labeled the great continental path leading to the
Carolinas "Route que les Francois." Successive maps all showed the
passing over the Cumberland Mountain at the great wind gap, indicating
portages and villages of the Chaouanona (Shawnees) in the river valleys.
Lewis Evans' map in 1755 of "The Middle British Colonies in America"
shows the courses of the Totteroy (Big Sandy River) and of the Kentucky
River. Thomas Hutchins in 1788, who became a Captain in the 60th Royal
American Regiment of Foot, was appointed Geographer General under
General Nathanael Greene and had unusual opportunity to observe
geographically the vast wilderness beyond the Alleghenies. On his map
the Kentucky River (where Boone was to establish a fort) was called the
Cuttawa, the Green River was the Buffalo, the Cumberland was indicated
as Shawanoe, and the Tennessee was the Cherokee. Though there were
numerous trails in the Cumberland plateau, the Geographer General
indicated only one, the Warrior's Path which he called the "Path to the
Cuttawa Country." He too showed the Gap in the "Ouasioto" Mountains
leading to the Cuttawa Country.
With the increase of map-making, more projects were launched. There were
large colonizing schemes to induce settlement along the frontier, but
colonizing was not the only idea in the heads of the wealthy Virginia
investors. They were not unmindful of the riches in furs to be garnered
in the Blue Ridge. In this connection Dr. Thomas Walker's expedition for
the Loyal Land Company in 1750 was important. Dr. Walker, an Englishman,
was sent into what is now Kentucky where the company had a grant of
"eight hundred thousand acres." A man could buy fifty acres for five
shillings sterling, the doctor explained. He was not only a physician
but a surveyor as well, and primarily the purpose of these early
expeditions was surveying--to lay out the boundaries of the land to be
sold to incoming settlers. Such an expedition was composed usually of
some six or eight men each equipped with horse, dog, and gun.
Fortunately the doctor-surveyor was not illiterate like young Gabriel
Arthur. Walker set down an interesting account of the expedition which
was especially glowing from the trader's point of view. In their four
months in the wilderness the Walker expedition killed, aside from
buffalo, wild geese, and turkeys, fifty-three bears and twenty deer. And
the doctor added that they could have trebled the number. Walker
followed the Warrior's Path as young Gabriel Arthur had more than
seventy years before. The rivers they crossed, as well as the places on
the way which were sometimes no more than salt licks, bore Indian names.
But when Dr. Walker reached the great barrier between Kentucky and
Virginia he was so deeply moved by the vastness and grandeur of the
mountains that he called his companions about him. "It is worthy of a
noble name," said Dr. Walker. "Let us call it Cumberland for our Duke in
far-off England." When the expedition reached the gap that permitted
them to pass through into the Cuttawa country he cried exultantly, "This
too shall be named for our Duke." So Cumberland Gap it became and the
mountain known to pioneers as Laurel Mountain became instead Cumberland
Mountain.
The doctor-surveyor could not know that one day he would be hailed as
"the first white man in Cumberland Gap" by those sturdy settlers who
were to follow his course. When Dr. Walker reached the Indians' Totteroy
River, or rather the two forks that combine to make it, he called the
stream to the right, which touched West Virginia soil, Louisa or Levisa
for the wife of the Duke of Cumberland.
This leader of the expedition of the Loyal Land Company jotted down much
that he saw. There was the amazing "burning spring" that shot up right
out of the earth, its flame so brilliant the doctor could read his map
by the glow at a distance of several miles. Apparently he was not
concerned with the cause but rather with the effect of the burning
spring. He saw the painted picture language of the Indians on mountain
side and tree trunk.
Dr. Walker returned on a second expedition in 1758, but he gained only
partial knowledge of the wilderness land. However, the mountain he named
determined the course of the trail which was to be laid out by Daniel
Boone, and the gap through which he passed became the gateway for
thousands of horizon-seekers.
Their coming was not without hazard.
The southern Indians resented the invasion of their hunting ground by
the English. The French-Indians incited by the French settlers in the
Mississippi Valley who wanted the wealth of fur-bearing animals for
themselves, began to swoop down on the settlements of the
English-speaking people along the frontier, massacring them by the
hundreds.
The Assembly in Philadelphia turned a deaf ear to the frontiersmen's
plea for help, so the Scotch-Irish, accustomed to fighting for their
rights, organized companies of Rangers to defend themselves against the
attacks of the Indians. With continued massacre of their people their
desperation grew. If they could have no voice in governmental matters in
Pennsylvania and could expect no protection from that source against the
warring Indians, they could move on. They did. On down the Valley of
Virginia they came into Carolina. They built their little cabins,
planted crops, and by 1764 had laid out two townships, one of which,
Mecklenburg, figured in an important way in America's independence.
As each settlement became more thickly settled the more venturesome
spirits pressed on into the mountains. And as they moved forward,
clearing forests and planting ground for their bread, they dislodged
hunters and trappers who had preceded them. For all of them there was
always the troublesome Indian to be reckoned with. A cunning warrior, he
pounced upon the newcomer at most unexpected times. To maintain a
measure of safety the pioneer began to build block houses and forts
along the watercourses traveled by the Indians. Fur-trading posts were
set up by the Crown but even when the Indian seemed satisfied with the
exchange he might take prisoner a trader or explorer and subject him to
torture, or even put him to death. The homes of settlers were objects of
constant attack. It would take white men of more cunning than the Indian
to deal with him: fearless and daring fighters.
About the time Dr. Walker had started on his expedition in 1755, a
family living in Pennsylvania packed up their belongings and moved down
into the Valley of Virginia. There were the father, his sons, and his
brothers. They hadn't stayed long in Rockingham County, barely long
enough to raise a crop, when they moved again. This time they journeyed
on down to the valley of the Yadkin River in North Carolina and there
they stayed. All but one son--Daniel Boone, a lad of eighteen. Even as a
boy he had roamed the woods alone, and once was lost for days. When his
father and friends found him, guided by a stream of smoke rising in the
distance, Daniel wasn't in tears. Instead, seated on the pelt of a wild
animal he had killed and roasting a piece of its meat at the fire, he
was whistling gaily. He had made for himself a crude shelter of branches
and pelts. It was useless to chide his son, the older Boone found out.
So he saved his breath and let Daniel roam at his will. Soon the boy was
exploring and hunting farther and farther into the mountains.
On one such venture the young hunter alone "cilled a bar" and left the
record of his feat carved with his hunting knife upon a tree. His
imagination was fired with the tales of warfare about him, of the
courage and independence of the men who dwelt far up in the mountains.
He knew of the heroism of George Washington who, four years after the
Boones left Pennsylvania, had led a company of mountain men against the
French. He had heard the stories of how Washington had been driven back
with his mountain men at Great Meadows. Boone longed to be in the thick
of the fray. So in 1755, when General Braddock came to "punish the
French for their insolence" and Washington accompanied him with one
hundred mountain men from North Carolina, Daniel Boone, for all his
youth, was among them--as brave a fighter and as skilled a shot as the
best.
This was high adventure for young Daniel. It spurred him to further
daring, and he set out on more and more distant explorations. Each time
he returned from his trips with marvelous tales of what he had seen, of
unbelievable numbers of buffalo and deer and wild beasts he had
encountered. He always had an audience. No one listened with greater
eagerness than the pretty dark-eyed daughter of the Bryans who were
neighbors to the Boones. Daniel was still a young man, only
twenty-three, when in 1755 he married Rebecca Bryan. They had five sons
and four daughters. Rebecca stayed home and took care of the children,
while her adventurous husband continued to rove and hunt on long
expeditions.
Neighbors gossiped, even in a pioneer settlement. They said Daniel
wasn't nice to Rebecca, going away all the time on such long hunting
trips. They even talked to Rebecca about her careless husband. But
Rebecca paid little heed, though she may have chided him in private for
returning so tattered. Sometimes his hunting coat, which was a loose
frock with a cape made from dressed deerskin, would literally be tied
together when he returned. Even the fringe which Rebecca had
painstakingly cut to trim his leggings and coat had been left hanging on
jagged rocks and underbrush through which he had dragged himself. His
coonskin cap, with the bushy brush of it hanging down on his neck, was
sometimes a sorry sight. One can hear Rebecca asking, as the hunter
removed his outer garments, "Were there no creeks on your journey?" His
leather belt he hung upon a wall peg after he had oiled it with bear
grease. His tomahawk which he always wore on the right side, and the
hunting knife which he carried on the left with his powder horn and
bullet pouch, he laid carefully aside. He inspected his trusty flintlock
rifle.... He had slept under cliffs, wrapped in his buffalo blanket with
his dog, with leaves and brush for a pillow. His thick club of hair had
not been untied in weeks. The chute bark with which it was fastened was
full of chinks. There was something worse. "What are you scratching
for?" Rebecca would pause from stirring the kettle at the hearth, to
survey her husband who was digging his fingers into his scalp. "Lice!"
gasped Rebecca. Instead of jowering, she would give him a good
scrubbing, comb out his matted hair, and clean him up generally and
thoroughly.
Daniel was a restless soul. And every time he returned home he was more
restless. So the Boones moved from place to place and each time others
went along with them. Daniel had a knack of leadership, but no sooner
would everyone be settled around him than he'd pack up and go to another
place. Daniel couldn't be crowded. He had to have elbow room no matter
where he had to go to get it.
In the twenty-five years he spent in North Carolina Boone cleared
ground, cut timber, and built a home many times--and all the while he
continued to hunt and explore.
Finally returning from one of his long expeditions he told glowing tales
of another country he had found. Bears were so thick, and deer, it would
take a crew of men to help him kill them and salvage the rich hides. He
persuaded Rebecca to come along with him and bring the children. Once
more Rebecca packed up their few worldly goods, while Daniel made sure
his guns were well oiled, his hunting knife whetted, his dogs fit for
the journey--they meant as much to Boone as wife and children, gossips
said--and the family started for a new home.
This time, in 1760, they went far from the Yadkin into the Watauga
country of Tennessee. He crossed the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, and
settled in what was then western North Carolina, now eastern Tennessee.
That year he led a company as far westward as Abingdon, Virginia. But no
sooner were they settled than Daniel up and left to go deeper into the
forest.
Not only was he a great hunter, he was a good advance agent. Soon,
through his glowing accounts, the fame of the country spread far, even
to Pennsylvania and Virginia. Hunters came to join him. Some stayed with
him wherever he went. It was through his leadership that the first
permanent settlement was made in Tennessee in 1768.
But to go back a year. In 1767 Boone worked his way over the Big Sandy
Trail in the country which Dr. Walker had seen back in 1750. Daniel
lived alone in a crude hut on a fork of the Big Sandy River, close to a
salt lick, you may be sure, for he had to have salt to season the wild
meat which was his only food. He too saw the burning spring that had
helped Dr. Walker to scrutinize his maps at night. In 1768 he entered
Kentucky through Cumberland Gap and traversed the Warrior's Path. From
Pilot Knob he viewed the Great Meadow. That would be something more to
tell about when he got back home.
Though his neighbors may have considered him a shiftless fellow
concerned only with hunting and exploring, a fellow who was ever moving
from pillar to post, his very first visit to Watauga was not without
significance.
It was the way of the wilderness that settlers followed the first
hunters, and Boone with his companions had been in Watauga first in
1760. Eight years afterward a few families had followed the hunters'
trail for good reason.
Things had been going miserably for immigrants in North Carolina. The
situation was fast reaching a desperate point. Some of the oppressed
were for violence if that was needed to obtain justice in the courts.
Others reasoned that there was a better way out. Why not move away in a
body? The wilderness of the Blue Ridge beckoned. It was under Virginia
rule and perhaps life would not be so hard there. Because of Indian
treaties the lands had been surveyed in those rugged western reaches and
could be legally leased or even purchased. The more level-headed
mountain people reasoned in this way: Why not send one of their number
on ahead to look over the region, negotiate for boundaries, and stake
them out for families who decided to take up their abode there? A
Scotch-Irishman named James Robertson took upon himself this task.
During this period of unrest in North Carolina, Boone had returned with
Rebecca and the children to Watauga where they found others to welcome
them. If indeed Daniel needed a welcome or wanted it. Again he cleared a
piece of ground and built a log house. But the smoke no sooner curled up
from the chimney than scores of Scotch-Irish from North Carolina, who
could no longer bear the injustice of government officials, began to
crowd into the valley around him. This irked Daniel, for he loved the
freedom of the wilds. "I've got to have elbow room," he complained to
Rebecca, "I know a place--"
The Scotch-Irish, however, stayed on in Watauga.
They had had enough of injustice and were glad to escape a country where
the more prosperous were making life hard for the less fortunate
immigrants who continued to come down the Virginia Valley, and the
mountain people who settled in the rugged western part of the state.
Like their Scotch-Irish brothers in Pennsylvania, they had determined to
find a remedy. They remembered how the Rangers in the Pennsylvania
border settlements had been forced to take matters in their own hands to
protect life and home, and they organized their protective band called
the Regulators. If armed force was needed, they meant to use it. They
found the Governor as indifferent to their appeals for fairness as the
Pennsylvania Assembly had been to the Rangers' protests. If North
Carolina's Governor had been a man of cool and fair judgment, the
tragedy of Alamance might have been averted. On the other hand, the
first decisive step toward American independence might have been lost,
or at least delayed.
In ironic response to the pleas of the Regulators, the Governor of North
Carolina summoned a force of one thousand militia men and led them into
the western settlements. At the end of the day, May 16, 1771, two
hundred and fifty of the two thousand Regulators who had gathered with
their rifles at Alamance when they heard of the coming of the militia,
lay dead. The living were forced to retreat.
If Robertson had planned his return it could not have come at a more
auspicious moment. His neighbors had been sorely tried. They eagerly
welcomed words of a better land in which to live, and sixteen families
followed their leader to the Watauga country.
Things loomed dark for the new settlers for a time. It turned out that
the lands staked out for them were neither in Virginia nor Carolina.
Indeed Robertson and his neighbors found themselves quite "outside the
boundaries of civilized government."
The Scotch-Irish had not forgotten Ulster, and they lost no time in
making a treaty with the Indians upon whose territory they really were.
They drew up leases, and some of the seventeen families even purchased
part of the land.
Soon the ax was ringing in the forest. A cluster of cabins sprang up.
Another settlement was established and before long thousands came to
join the seventeen families who had followed James Robertson. So long as
there had been only a handful of neighbors the problem of government did
not present itself. The level-headed thinkers of the group again put
their heads together and pondered well. Now that they had burned their
bridges behind them they must make firm the rock upon which they built.
Above all they must stand united, with hearts and hands together for the
well-being of all. To that end they formed an Association, the Watauga
Association they called it, and adopted a constitution (1772) by which
to live. It was "the first ever adopted by a community of American-born
freemen," says Theodore Roosevelt in _The Winning of the West_.
If Daniel Boone had been a man to glow with pride he might well have
done so over the outcome of that first hunting trip he made to the
Watauga country. But Daniel was a hunter, an adventurer, an explorer who
loved above all else space. He didn't like being crowded by a lot of
neighbors. So again in 1773, calling his little family around the
fireside one night, he told them he meant to pull up stakes and move on.
They had only been there four years which was a brief time considering
the laborious journey they'd had to get there, the hardships of life, of
clearing ground and taking root again. However, if Rebecca offered
protest it was overcome. Daniel had a way with him. Perhaps she even
helped her husband convince members of her family that it was the thing
to do. Her folks, the Bryans, told others. The word passed around the
family circle until forty of the Bryans had decided they'd join Daniel
and Rebecca. Boone sold his home. Why bother with it! He'd probably
never be back there to live, for this time Daniel and Rebecca, with
their children, the Bryans, and Captain William Russell, were going on a
long journey. They were headed for Kentucky. Daniel had told them some
fine and promising yarns about his lone expedition to that far-off
country.
The way wasn't easy. Following watercourses, fording swollen streams,
picking their way over rocks and loose boulders, through mud and sand.
Besides there was the constant dread of the Indian. Their fears were
confirmed before they reached Cumberland Gap. While they were still in
Powell Valley a band of Indians attacked Boone's party. The women
huddled together in terror while the men seized their guns.
But for all his skill as a marksman, Daniel Boone could not stay the
hand of the Indian whose arrow pierced the heart of his oldest son.
There was another grave in the wilderness and the disheartened party
returned to the Watauga country. This time, however, Boone settled in
the Clinch Valley.
The Indians continued on a rampage. Consequently it was nearly two years
before Boone started again for Kentucky. This time he gained his goal,
though at first he did not take Rebecca and his family. He meant to make
a safe place for them to live.
These were times to try men's souls. Everywhere man yearned for freedom.
About this time a young Scotch-Irishman in Virginia astounded his
hearers by a speech he made at St. John's Church in Richmond. When the
zealous patriot cried, "Give me liberty, or give me death," the fervor
and eloquence of his voice echoed down the valleys. It re-echoed through
the mountains. That young orator, "Patrick Henry, and his Scotch-Irish
brethren from the western Counties carried and held Virginia for
Independence," it has been said.
There was unity in thought and purpose among the Scotch-Irish whether
they lived in highland or lowland and their purpose was to gain freedom
and independence. A bond of feeling that could not have existed among
the Dutch of New York, the Puritans of New England, the English of
Virginia, even if they had not been so widely separated geographically.
Moreover, the isolation of the Scotch-Irish in the wilderness, though it
cut them off from voice in the government or protection by it, made them
self-reliant people. They had had enough of royal government. Added to
this was their natural hatred of British aggression, distaste for the
unfairness of those in political power from whom they were so far
removed by miles and mountains. They thought for themselves and acted
accordingly. Their individualism marked them for leadership that was
readily followed by others who also had known persecution: the Palatine
Germans, the Dutch, and the Huguenots. They had another strong ally in
the English who had come from Virginia to settle in the mountains and
whose traditions of resolute action added to the mountaineer's spirit of
independence. The flame of agitation was fanned by the unfairness of
government officials in the lowlands. The mountain people had long since
looked to their own protection and their Scotch-Irish nature persisted
in resentment of unfairness from authority of any source. This spirit
prevailed among the incoming settlers in Carolina. There was
dissatisfaction between them and the planters, the men of means and
influence who with unfair taxation and injustice persecuted the less
prosperous newcomers. Discontent grew and brought on events that were
forerunners of the expansive militant movement that came in American
life.
First was the Declaration of Abingdon, Virginia, in January, 1775.
Daniel Boone had led an expedition there sixteen years earlier and may
have planted the seed in the minds of those who stayed on, while he went
on to Kentucky. Title to much of the land which embraced Kentucky was
claimed by the Cherokees. England still claimed the right to any
territory in America and the war's beginnings left the whole thing in
doubt. England might even make void Virginia's titles if she were so
inclined. In the midst of these doubts and disputed claims several North
Carolina gentlemen, including Richard Henderson and Nathaniel Hart, in
the spring of 1775 formed themselves into the Transylvania Company for
the purpose of acquiring title to the territory of Kentucky from the
Cherokees. They meant to operate on a great scale, to establish an
independent empire here in the "expansive West." They looked about for a
man to help them. They didn't have to look long.
There was Daniel Boone. He had a background. He'd scouted all over the
country. He'd fought with Washington against the French when he was only
in his teens. He was a fearless fellow; he knew how to deal with the
Indian. So the Transylvania Company employed Daniel as their
representative to negotiate with the Cherokees. The council met at
Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga, a tributary of the Holston River. There
the Cherokees ceded to the company for "ten thousand pounds, all the
vast tract of land lying between the Ohio and Cumberland rivers, and
west and south of the Kentucky." This region was called Transylvania.
So, just six years after his first hunting trip to Kentucky, Boone began
to colonize it and that in flat defiance of the British government. He
thumbed his nose too at a menacing proclamation of North Carolina's
royal governor.
Now that the land was acquired by the Transylvania Company they would
have to charter a course leading to and through it for prospective
settlers. For theirs was a "land and improvement company." Again Daniel
Boone was employed. This time his task was to open a path through the
wilderness.
With ax and tomahawk, with fighting and tribulations, he blazed the
trail from Holston River to the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky
River. "Boone's Trace," they called it, connecting with the Warrior's
Path and its extensions into eastern Tennessee and western North
Carolina through Cumberland Gap and even beyond. It became the
Wilderness Trail or Wilderness Road. It was the first through course
from the mother state of Virginia to the West.
In spite of the purchase of land from the Indian, in spite of all the
treaties of peace, the cunning warrior persisted in attack upon the
white men, in massacre of women and children, in capture of hunter and
trapper.
Daniel Boone and his men had to safeguard their families and the future
of their company. They set about building a fort. As for Boone, he felt
himself "an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness." No hardship
was too great, no sorrow too deep to deter him in his mission of
"pioneering and subduing the wilderness for the habitation of civilized
men."
After two years of hardship and toil a fort was built on the banks of
the Kentucky River. It consisted of cabins of roughhewn logs surrounded
by a stockade. Over this crude fort, in one cabin of which Boone and
Rebecca lived with their family, a flag was raised on May 23, 1775. It
marked a new and independent nation called Transylvania.
Only a week after the flag-raising in Kentucky the people of
Mecklenburg, which had been established only eleven years, made another
step toward independence. On May 31, 1775, the Mecklenburg Resolutions
were adopted in North Carolina.
In the meantime the Revolution had begun and mountain men were first to
join Washington against the British in the forces of Morgan's Riflemen
and Nelson's Riflemen. Their skill with firearms, their fearlessness,
made them invaluable to Washington. "It was their quality of cool
courage and personal independence," said Raine, "that won the battles of
Kings Mountain and Cowpens and drove Lord Cornwallis to his surrender at
Yorktown."
Each movement toward independence in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and
North Carolina had been under the leadership of mountain men and the
accomplishment of their several declarations paved the way for the more
widespread Continental Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia, July
4, 1776.
It echoed around the world, but Daniel Boone, that young rebel, didn't
even hear of it until the following August. Whereupon the fearless
hunter with the abandon of a happy lad danced a jig around the bonfire
inside the stockade. It could have been an Elizabethan jig, ironically
enough, for the Boones were English. Daniel tossed his coonskin cap into
the air again and again and let out a war whoop that brought the
terrified Rebecca hurrying to the cabin door, a whoop that pierced the
silence of the forest beyond.
By the time the Declaration was signed the mountain people constituted
one sixth of the settlement of the United States.
As for Daniel Boone, twenty-five years had passed since he, a boy of
sixteen, had left Pennsylvania with his father and brothers. He was
forty-one years old when he set up housekeeping at Boonesborough where
the fort stood on the banks of the Kentucky. Never in all his life had
he been quite so settled. Daniel had acquired title to lands from the
Transylvania Company and things looked promising. Rebecca too must have
been happy in their security. The children could safely play inside the
stockade even if they did squabble with the neighbors' children. Rebecca
must have sung a ballad betimes as she cooked venison or wild turkey at
the hearth, or swept the floor with her rived oak broom. For Daniel
could whittle a broom for her while he sat meditating aloud on his past
adventures. Daniel was satisfied. Rebecca could see that. Now with the
colony established in the wilderness Daniel Boone had realized the dream
of his life.
In the thirteen years Boone lived in Kentucky he continued to hunt and
trap and explore. He took others along with him on his various
expeditions. In January, 1778, with a party of thirty men he went to
make salt at Blue Lick. He knew the places to go for he had found them
previously by following the path of buffalo, deer, and bear that had
gone there to lick salt. Boone and his men threw up rough shelters for
themselves. Soon the kettles were boiling, the salt was made. They were
in the midst of preparations to pack up their belongings and load the
salt into bags when Daniel's keen ears caught the sound of moccasined
feet in the underbrush nearby. Suddenly as if they had popped up out of
the ground a band of Indians pounced upon the white men. All but three
of Boone's party were captured. They escaped and after hiding the
kettles took the salt back to the stockade. Daniel and two of his
companions were borne off to Detroit.
Boone was a wary fellow, so he pretended to be quite contented with his
lot and the Indians were so pleased with him they adopted him as a son
into their tribe. He would have looked a fright to Rebecca for the
Indians cropped his hair close to the scalp save a tuft on the top of
his head which was bedecked with trinkets--shells, teeth of wild
animals, feathers. The women dressed him up in this fashion, first
taking him to the river and giving him a thorough scrubbing "to take out
his white blood." Then they painted his face with colors as bright as
those of any chieftain in the tribe. Daniel was a good actor. He
pretended to be highly pleased, but he was only awaiting the chance to
escape. One day there was quite a stir in the camp. Daniel observed many
new faces among the warriors. They talked and gesticulated excitedly,
and Boone soon gathered the purpose of the powwow. "They're going on the
warpath," Daniel said to himself, "and to my notion they're headed
toward our stockade." While they continued to harangue among themselves
Daniel stealthily made his escape. He covered the intervening one
hundred and sixty miles in five days.
The Indians didn't carry out their plan to attack the fort until some
weeks later and when they did march into view they were led by Captain
Duquesne of the English Army.
The siege lasted for nine days but the veteran riflemen of the fort,
under Boone's skillful direction, gained the day with only a loss of
three or four men, while many of the four hundred Indians fell.
There were many other battles with the Indians who crossed the Ohio into
Kentucky, and though Boone was always in the thick of the fray he came
out uninjured.
And then misfortune came in another way.
Things had looked fair enough in the beginning when the Transylvania
Company sold boundaries of land to settlers, with Colonel Henderson, a
bright lawyer who had once been appointed Associate Chief Justice, to
look after the legal side of the transactions. The company asked only
thirteen and one third cents per acre for the land for one year and an
added half cent per acre quitrent to begin in 1780. At such a low rate
it was possible for a man to purchase a boundary of six hundred acres.
When Daniel talked it over with Rebecca they concluded he would not be
overreaching himself to invest in such an acreage.
The Transylvania Company did a land-office business. By December of the
first year after Colonel Henderson opened up his office for business in
Boonesborough 560,000 acres were sold. That was all right for the
company, but what of the purchaser? What with the squabbles and disputes
concerning title between Indian and settler, English and French, Boone
like others soon found himself with not a leg to stand on. He had bought
"wildcat" land. Land-sharks cleaned him out.
At the age of fifty-four, in 1788, Daniel had to start all over again.
With Rebecca at his side and a larger family he moved on.
Boone had scouted through the West Virginia country long before, when he
had passed a solitary winter in a hut on the Big Sandy. So now once more
he turned in that direction, pressing on until he reached the mouth of
the Great Kanawha River. He lived from place to place in the Kanawha
country, following his old pursuits of hunting and trapping, and as
usual absented himself from his fireside for long days at a stretch. But
Rebecca was used to his ways. She looked after the family, cooked and
mended. When Daniel returned home Rebecca always cleaned him up again
before he started on another hunting trip.
Eleven years passed without a word being said about land titles. Then
one day Daniel found himself facing the same situation that had robbed
him of his acres in Kentucky. A man of sixty-five, and with a family of
seven, three boys and four girls--two of their boys had been killed in
battle with the Indians--Daniel, though still a fearless hunter, didn't
want to be bothered with squabbles over land titles. He told Rebecca
there was an easier way around. There were places outside of the
jurisdiction of the United States altogether. "We don't have to be
beholden to anyone," he said boastfully.
Pioneer women followed their men. So once more Rebecca made ready for
the journey. She mended garments; she gathered up their few cooking
utensils and the furry hides that were their blankets. She tied some of
her choice things in her apron. That she'd carry right on her arm. The
boys helped their father make ready the great cumbersome cart that was
to carry their possessions. When all was in readiness Daniel pulled on
his coonskin cap and whistling up his dogs he started off resolutely
ahead of his family.
On and on they went until they reached Spanish territory beyond the
Mississippi in Upper Louisiana. There at Charette (fifty miles west of
St. Louis) Daniel Boone remained for a score of years, still hunting and
trapping.
Even after Rebecca died he stayed on in the log cabin that had been
their home for so long. An old man of seventy-eight he was, with many a
sorrow to look back upon. For him the trail had been a "bloody one,"
Daniel often reflected. He had seen two of his boys fall under the
tomahawk, and his brothers too. He had seen Rebecca's grief and terror
at bloodshed; her anxiety in the lonely life of the wilderness. He had
seen her despair when the very ground in which they had taken root was
torn from under their feet. He had known the suffering of winter winds,
the desolation of the forest. He had suffered innumerable hardships. All
these things he lived again as he sat alone in the house where Rebecca
had died.
But the spirit of the hunter still burned in the old man's bosom at the
age of eighty-five. Even then he was all for shouldering his gun once
more and setting out with an Indian lad to explore the Rockies. His son
persuaded him to give up the thought. "You're too old, Pa. If you fall
over a cliff your bones would be broke to smithereens. Come and live
with me. My house is safe. It's all built of stone. The Indians can't
burn down a stone house." After much bickering Daniel finally heeded his
son and went to live with him. He died there in 1822.
The fort which he so proudly built and valiantly defended continues to
bear his name, being one of at least thirty localities in the United
States which take their name from the first pioneer of the great valley
of the Mississippi. His body lies in a little cemetery in Kentucky's
capital. A humble grave, though as you stand beside it you feel the
spirit of the great hunter hovering near. A courageous explorer in
leather breeches and coonskin cap blazed the trail through an unbroken
wilderness to help build America.
At length through Cumberland Gap following Boone's Wilderness Trail came
the ancestors of David Crockett, Samuel Houston, John C. Calhoun,
"Stonewall" Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. The Boones and Lincolns had
been neighbors back in Pennsylvania in one of the most German
settlements. Yet both families themselves were English.