Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in our history as
the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a true
pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters,
game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation
after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the
Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument
ordained of God to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania,
he drifted south into western North Carolina, and settled on what
was then the extreme frontier. There he married, built a log cabin,
and hunted, chopped trees, and tilled the ground like any other
frontiersman. The Alleghany Mountains still marked a boundary beyond
which the settlers dared not go; for west of them lay immense reaches
of frowning forest, uninhabited save by bands of warlike Indians.
Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper penetrated this
immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had
seen and done.
[Illustration: Daniel Boone in the frontier woods. At close
quarters.]
In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales, determined
himself to cross the mountains and find out what manner of land
it was that lay beyond. With a few chosen companions he set out,
making his own trail through the gloomy forest. After weeks of
wandering, he at last emerged into the beautiful and fertile country
of Kentucky, for which, in after years, the red men and the white
strove with such obstinate fury that it grew to be called "the dark
and bloody ground." But when Boone first saw it, it was a fair and
smiling land of groves and glades and running waters, where the
open forest grew tall and beautiful, and where innumerable herds of
game grazed, roaming ceaselessly to and fro along the trails they
had trodden during countless generations. Kentucky was not owned by
any Indian tribe, and was visited only by wandering war-parties and
hunting-parties who came from among the savage nations living north
of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.
A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and killed
him, and the others then left Boone and journeyed home; but his
brother came out to join him, and the two spent the winter together.
Self-reliant, fearless, and possessed of great bodily strength and
hardihood, they cared little for the loneliness. The teeming myriads
of game furnished abundant food; the herds of shaggy-maned bison and
noble-antlered elk, the bands of deer and the numerous black bear,
were all ready for the rifle, and they were tame and easily slain.
The wolf and the cougar, too, sometimes fell victims to the prowess
of the two hunters.
At times they slept in hollow trees, or in some bush lean-to of their
own making; at other times, when they feared Indians, they changed
their resting-place every night, and after making a fire would go off
a mile or two in the woods to sleep. Surrounded by brute and human,
foes, they owed their lives to their sleepless vigilance, their keen
senses, their eagle eyes, and their resolute hearts.
When the spring came, and the woods were white with the dogwood
blossoms, and crimsoned with the red-bud, Boone's brother left him,
and Daniel remained for three months alone in the wilderness. The
brother soon came back again with a party of hunters; and other
parties likewise came in, to wander for months and years through the
wilderness; and they wrought huge havoc among the vast herds of game.
In 1771 Boone returned to his home. Two years later he started to
lead a party of settlers to the new country; but while passing
through the frowning defiles of Cumberland Gap they were attacked
by Indians, and driven back--two of Boone's own sons being slain.
In 1775, however, he made another attempt; and this attempt was
successful. The Indians attacked the newcomers; but by this time the
parties of would-be settlers were sufficiently numerous to hold their
own. They beat back the Indians, and built rough little hamlets,
surrounded by log stockades, at Boonesborough and Harrodsburg; and
the permanent settlement of Kentucky had begun.
The next few years were passed by Boone amid unending Indian
conflicts. He was a leader among the settlers, both in peace and
in war. At one time he represented them in the House of Burgesses
of Virginia; at another time he was a member of the first little
Kentucky parliament itself; and he became a colonel of the frontier
militia. He tilled the land, and he chopped the trees himself;
he helped to build the cabins and stockades with his own hands,
wielding the long-handled, light-headed frontier ax as skilfully
as other frontiersmen. His main business was that of surveyor, for
his knowledge of the country, and his ability to travel through it,
in spite of the danger from Indians, created much demand for his
services among people who wished to lay off tracts of wild land for
their own future use. But whatever he did, and wherever he went, he
had to be sleeplessly on the lookout for his Indian foes. When he
and his fellows tilled the stump-dotted fields of corn, one or more
of the party were always on guard, with weapon at the ready, for
fear of lurking savages. When he went to the House of Burgesses he
carried his long rifle, and traversed roads not a mile of which was
free from the danger of Indian attack. The settlements in the early
years depended exclusively upon game for their meat, and Boone was
the mightiest of all the hunters, so that upon him devolved the task
of keeping his people supplied. He killed many buffaloes, and pickled
the buffalo beef for use in winter. He killed great numbers of black
bear, and made bacon of them, precisely as if they had been hogs. The
common game were deer and elk. At that time none of the hunters of
Kentucky would waste a shot on anything so small as a prairie-chicken
or wild duck; but they sometimes killed geese and swans when they
came south in winter and lit on the rivers. But whenever Boone went
into the woods after game, he had perpetually to keep watch lest he
himself might be hunted in turn. He never lay in wait at a game-lick,
save with ears strained to hear the approach of some crawling
red foe. He never crept up to a turkey he heard calling, without
exercising the utmost care to see that it was not an Indian; for one
of the favorite devices of the Indians was to imitate the turkey
call, and thus allure within range some inexperienced hunter.
Besides this warfare, which went on in the midst of his usual
vocations, Boone frequently took the field on set expeditions
against the savages. Once when he and a party of other men were
making salt at a lick, they were surprised and carried off by the
Indians. The old hunter was a prisoner with them for some months, but
finally made his escape and came home through the trackless woods as
straight as the wild pigeon flies. He was ever on the watch to ward
off the Indian inroads, and to follow the war-parties, and try to
rescue the prisoners. Once his own daughter, and two other girls who
were with her, were carried off by a band of Indians. Boone raised
some friends and followed the trail steadily for two days and a
night; then they came to where the Indians had killed a buffalo calf
and were camped around it. Firing from a little distance, the whites
shot two of the Indians, and, rushing in, rescued the girls. On
another occasion, when Boone had gone to visit a salt-lick with his
brother, the Indians ambushed them and shot the latter. Boone himself
escaped, but the Indians followed him for three miles by the aid of a
tracking dog, until Boone turned, shot the dog, and then eluded his
pursuers. In company with Simon Kenton and many other noted hunters
and wilderness warriors, he once and again took part in expeditions
into the Indian country, where they killed the braves and drove off
the horses. Twice bands of Indians, accompanied by French, Tory, and
British partizans from Detroit, bearing the flag of Great Britain,
attacked Boonesborough. In each case Boone and his fellow-settlers
beat them off with loss. At the fatal battle of the Blue Licks, in
which two hundred of the best riflemen of Kentucky were beaten with
terrible slaughter by a great force of Indians from the lakes, Boone
commanded the left wing. Leading his men, rifle in hand, he pushed
back and overthrew the force against him; but meanwhile the Indians
destroyed the right wing and center, and got round in his rear, so
that there was nothing left for Boone's men except to flee with all
possible speed.
As Kentucky became settled, Boone grew restless and ill at ease.
He loved the wilderness; he loved the great forests and the great
prairie-like glades, and the life in the little lonely cabin, where
from the door he could see the deer come out into the clearing at
nightfall. The neighborhood of his own kind made him feel cramped
and ill at ease. So he moved ever westward with the frontier; and
as Kentucky filled up he crossed the Mississippi and settled on the
borders of the prairie country of Missouri, where the Spaniards,
who ruled the territory, made him an alcalde, or judge. He lived to
a great age, and died out on the border, a backwoods hunter to the
last.