The Cherokees were conducting a warfare in defense of their villages, fields, and hunting-grounds, which were being rapidly destroyed by the inrush of white settlers, who seemed to think that the Indians had no rights worth consideration. Encouraged by the French, who deemed the English intruders on lands which they had first explored, the American aborigines seriously thought that they might stem the tide of English settlement. It was impossible that they should win, for civilization has in such cases ever triumphed over savagery; but that they should make the attempt was to be expected from a high-spirited race trained to war. We can but sympathize with and honor them for making their several stout stands against the European wave which was ultimately to sweep them from their native land. King Philip, Opecancano, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Red Jacket, Sitting Bull, Captain Jack, were types of successive leaders who, at various stages of our growth westward, have stood as bravely as any Spartan hero to contest our all-conquering advance.

It is the time-honored custom of historians of the frontier to consider Indians as all wrong and whites as all right; and that, of course, was the opinion of the borderers themselves — of Daniel Boone and all the men of his day. But we are now far enough removed from these events, and the fierce passions they engendered, to see them more clearly. The Indian was a savage and fought like a savage — cruel, bloodthirsty, unrelenting, treacherous, seldom a respecter of childhood, of age, or of women. But one can not read closely the chronicles of border warfare without discovering that civilized men at times could, in fighting savages, descend quite as low in the scale as they, in bloodthirstiness and treachery. Some of the most atrocious acts in the pioneer history of Kentucky and the Middle West were performed by whites; and some of the most Christianlike deeds — there were many such on both sides — were those of painted savages.

It is needless to blame either of the contending races; their conflict was inevitable. The frontiersman was generally unlettered, and used, without ceremony, to overcoming the obstacles which nature set in his path; one more patient could not have tamed the wilderness as quickly as he. His children often rose to high positions as scholars, statesmen, and diplomats. But he himself was a diamond in the rough, and not accustomed to nice ethical distinctions. To his mind the Indian was an inferior being, if not a child of Satan; he was not making the best use of the soil; his customs and habits of thought were such as to repel the British mind, however much they may have attracted the French. The tribesmen, whom the pioneer could not and would not understand, stood in his way, hence must be made to go or to die in his tracks. When the savage, quick to resentment, struck back, the turbulent passions of the overbearing white were aroused, and with compound interest he repaid the blow. Upon the theory that the devil must be fought with fire, the borderer not seldom adopted methods of reprisal that outdid the savage in brutality.

The red man fighting, after his own wild standards, for all that he held most dear, and the white man, who brooks no opposition from an inferior race, hitting back with a fury sometimes increased by fear — such, in brief, is the blood-stained history of the American border.

Chapter V.
Kentucky Reached at Last

When Daniel Boone returned from tidewater Virginia to the Yadkin region is not now known. It is probable that the monotony of hauling tobacco to market at a time when his old neighbors were living in a state of panic palled upon a man who loved excitement and had had a taste of Indian warfare. It has been surmised that he served with the Rowan rangers upon Lyttleton’s campaign, alluded to in the previous chapter, and possibly aided in defending Fort Dobbs, or served with Waddell under Montgomery. That he was, some time in 1760, in the mountains west of the Yadkin upon either a hunt or a scout, or both, appears to be well established; for up to a few years ago there was still standing upon the banks of Boone’s Creek, a small tributary of the Watauga in eastern Tennessee, a tree upon whose smooth bark had been rudely carved this characteristic legend, undoubtedly by the great hunter himself: “D Boon cilled A BAR on this tree year 1760.”

We have already seen that he accompanied Waddell in 1761, when that popular frontier leader reenforced Colonel Byrd’s expedition against the Cherokees. Upon Waddell’s return to North Carolina his leather-shirted followers dispersed to their homes, and Boone was again enabled to undertake a protracted hunt, no longer disturbed by fear that in his absence Indians might raid the settlement; for hunting was now his chief occupation, his wife and children conducting the farm, which held second place in his affections. Thus we see how close the borderers came to the savage life wherein men are the warriors and hunters and women the crop-gatherers and housekeepers. Organizing a party of kindred spirits — a goodly portion of the Yadkin settlers were more hunters than farmers — Boone crossed the mountains and roamed through the valleys of southwest Virginia and eastern Tennessee, being especially delighted with the Valley of the Holston, where game was found to be unusually abundant. At about the same time another party of nineteen hunters went upon a similar expedition into the hills and valleys westward of the Yadkin, penetrating well into Tennessee, and being absent for eighteen months.

A BooneTree.Tree on Boone’s Creek, Tenn., bearing Daniel Boone’s autograph.A Boone Tree. Tree on Boone’s Creek, Tenn., bearing Daniel Boone’s autograph.

We must not conclude, from the passionate devotion to hunting exhibited by these backwoodsmen of the eighteenth century, that they led the same shiftless, aimless lives as are followed by the “poor whites” found in some of the river-bottom communities of our own day, who are in turn farmers, fishermen, or hunters, as fancy or the seasons dictate. It must be remembered that farming upon the Virginia and Carolina uplands was, in the pioneer period, crude as to methods and insignificant as to crops. The principal wealth of the well-to-do was in herds of horses and cattle which grazed in wild meadows, and in droves of long-nosed swine feeding upon the roots and acorns of the hillside forests. Among the outlying settlers much of the family food came from the woods, and often months would pass without bread being seen inside the cabin walls. Besides the live stock of the richer folk, whose herds were driven to market, annual caravans to tidewater towns carried furs and skins won by the real backwoodsmen, who lived on the fringe of the wilderness. For lack of money accounts were kept in pelts, and with these were purchased rifles, ammunition, iron, and salt. It was, then, to the forests that the borderers largely looked for their sustenance. Hence those long hunts, from which the men of the Yadkin, unerring marksmen, would come back laden with great packs of pelts for the markets, and dried venison, bear’s meat, and bear’s oil for their family larders. Naturally, this wandering, adventurous life, spiced with excitement in many forms, strongly appealed to the rough, hardy borderers, and unfitted them for other occupations. Under such conditions farming methods were not likely to improve, nor the arts of civilization to prosper; for the hunter not only best loved the wilderness, but settlement narrowed his hunting-grounds. Thus it was that the frontiersman of the Daniel Boone type, Indian hater as he was, had at heart much the same interests as the savage whom he was seeking to supplant. It was simply a question as to which hunter, red or white, should occupy the forest; to neither was settlement welcome.

With the opening of 1762 the southwest border began to be reoccupied. The abandoned log cabins once more had fires lighted upon their hearths, at the base of the great outside chimneys of stones and mud-plastered boughs; the deserted clearings, which had become choked with weeds and underbrush in the five years of Indian warfare, were again cultivated by their reassured owners. Among the returned refugees were Daniel’s parents, Squire and Sarah Boone, who had ridden on horseback overland all the way from Maryland. Three years later Squire Boone died, one of the most highly esteemed men in the valley.

The Yadkin country was more favored than some other portions of the backwoods of North Carolina. Pontiac’s uprising (1763) against the English, who had now supplanted the French in Canada and in the wilderness between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, led some of the Southern tribes again to attack the frontiers of the Southwest; but they were defeated before the Yadkin was affected by this fresh panic.

The Indian wars had lasted so long that the entire border had become demoralized. Of course not all the people in the backwoods were of good character. Not a few of them had been driven out from the more thickly settled parts of the country because of crimes or of bad reputation; and some of the fur-traders who lived upon the edge of the settlement were sorry rogues. When the panic-stricken people were crowded within the narrow walls of the forts they could not work. Many of them found this life of enforced idleness to their liking, and fell into the habit of making secret expeditions to plunder abandoned houses and to steal uncared-for live stock. When peace came these marauders had acquired a distaste for honest labor; leaving the forts, they pillaged right and left, and horse-stealing became an especially prevalent frontier vice.

Justice on the border was as yet insufficiently organized. Some of the Virginia and Carolina magistrates were themselves rascals, whose decisions could be purchased by criminals. Many of the best citizens, therefore, formed associations whose members were called “regulators.” They bound themselves to pursue, arrest, and try criminals, and to punish them by whipping, also by expulsion from the neighborhood. The law-breakers, on the other hand, organized in defense, and popular opinion was divided between the two elements; for there were some good people who did not like the arbitrary methods of the regulators, and insisted upon every man being given a regular trial by jury. In South Carolina, particularly, the settlers were much exercised on this question, and arrayed themselves into opposing bands, armed to carry out their respective views. For a time civil war was feared; but finally, after five years of disturbance, an agreement was reached, efficient courts were established, and justice triumphed.

Affairs did not reach so serious a stage in North Carolina. Nevertheless there were several bands of vicious and indolent men, who, entrenched in the hills, long defied the regulators. One of these parties built a rude stockaded fort beneath an overhanging cliff in the mountains back of the Yadkin settlements. They stole horses, cattle, farming utensils; in fact, anything that they could lay their hands upon. One day they grew so bold as to kidnap a girl. The settlers, now roused to action, organized attacking companies, one of them headed by Daniel Boone, and carried the log fortress of the bandits by storm. The culprits were taken to Salisbury jail and the clan broken up.

The rapid growth of the country soon made game scarce in Boone’s neighborhood. Not only did the ever-widening area of cleared fields destroy the cover, but there were, of course, more hunters than before. Thus our Nimrod, who in his early manhood cared for nothing smaller than deer, was compelled to take extended trips in his search for less-frequented places. It was not long before he had explored all the mountains and valleys within easy reach, and become familiar with the views from every peak in the region, many of them five and six thousand feet in height.

As early as 1764-65 Boone was in the habit of taking with him, upon these trips near home, his little son James, then seven or eight years of age. This was partly for company, but mainly for the lad’s education as a hunter. Frequently they would spend several days together in the woods during the autumn and early winter — the deer-hunting season — and often, when in “open” camps, were overtaken by snow-storms. On such occasions the father would keep the boy warm by clasping him to his bosom as they lay with feet toward the glowing camp-fire. As the well-taught lad grew into early manhood these two companions would be absent from home for two and three months together, always returning well laden with the spoils of the chase.

Hunters in Boone’s day had two kinds of camp — “open” when upon the move, which meant sleeping in their blankets upon the ground wherever darkness or weariness overtook them; “closed” where remaining for some time in a locality. A closed camp consisted of a rude hut of logs or poles, the front entirely open, the sides closely chinked with moss, and the roof covered with blankets, boughs, or bark, sloping down to a back-log. In times when the Indians were not feared a fire was kept up throughout the night, in front, in order to warm the enclosure. Upon a bed of hemlock boughs or of dried leaves the hunters lay with heads to the back-log and stockinged feet to the blaze, for their spongy moccasins were hung to dry. Such a camp, often called a “half-faced cabin,” was carefully placed so that it might be sheltered by neighboring hills from the cold north and west winds. It was fairly successful as a protection from rain and snow, and sometimes served a party of hunters throughout several successive seasons; but it was ill-fitted for the coldest weather. Boone frequently occupied a shelter of this kind in the woods of Kentucky.

During the last four months of 1765 Boone and seven companions went on horseback to the new colony of Florida with a view to moving thither if they found it suited to their tastes. Wherever possible, they stopped overnight at borderers’ cabins upon the frontiers of the Carolinas and Georgia. But such opportunities did not always occur; they often suffered from hunger, and once they might have died from starvation but for the timely succor of a roving band of Seminole Indians. They explored Florida all the way from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and appear to have had a rather wretched time of it. The trails were miry from frequent rains, the number and extent of the swamps appalled them, and there was not game enough to satisfy a man like Boone, who scorned alligators. Pensacola, however, so pleased him that he determined to settle there, and purchased a house and lot which he might in due time occupy. Upon their return Boone told his wife of his Pensacola venture, but this sturdy woman of the frontier spurned the idea of moving to a gameless land. So the town lot was left to take care of itself, and henceforth the dutiful husband looked only to the West as his model of a perfect country.

At the close of the French and Indian War there arrived in the Boone settlement a Scotch-Irishman named Benjamin Cutbirth, aged about twenty-three years. He was a man of good character and a fine hunter. Marrying Elizabeth Wilcoxen, a niece of Daniel Boone, he and Boone went upon long hunts together, and attained that degree of comradeship which joint life in a wilderness camp is almost certain to produce.

In 1766 several families from North Carolina went to Louisiana, apparently by sea to New Orleans, and founded an English settlement above Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River. The news of this event gave rise to a general desire for exploring the country between the mountains and the great river. The year following, Cutbirth, John Stuart, John Baker, and John Ward, all of them young married men on the Yadkin, and excellent hunters, resolved to perform this feat, and if possible to discover a region superior to their own valley. They crossed the mountain range and eventually saw the Mississippi, being, so far as we know from contemporary documents, the first party of white men to succeed in this overland enterprise. Possibly fur-traders may have done so before them, but they left no record to prove it.

Cutbirth and his friends spent a year or two upon the river. In the autumn they ascended the stream for a considerable distance, also one of its tributaries, made a stationary camp for the winter, and in the spring descended to New Orleans, where they sold at good prices their skins, furs, bear-bacon, bear’s oil, buffalo “jerk” (dried meat), tallow, and dried venison hams. Their expedition down the river was performed at great risks, for they had many hairbreadth escapes from snags, river banks shelving in, whirlpools, wind-storms, and Indians. Their reward, says a chronicler of the day, was “quite a respectable property;” but while upon their return homeward, overland, they were set upon by Choctaws, who robbed them of their all.

Meanwhile, Daniel Boone was slow in making up his mind to leave home and the wife and family whom he dearly loved for so long and perilous a trip as a journey into the now much-talked-of land of Kentucky. Perhaps, despite his longings, he might never have gone had affairs upon the Yadkin remained satisfactory to him. But game, his chief reliance, was year by year becoming harder to obtain. And the rascally agents of Earl Granville, the principal landholder of the region, from whom the Boones had purchased, were pretending to find flaws in the land-titles and insisting upon the necessity for new deeds, for which large fees were exacted.

This gave rise to great popular discontent. Boone’s protest consisted in leaving the Sugar Tree settlement and moving northwest for sixty-five miles toward the head of the Yadkin. His new cabin, a primitive shell of logs, could still be seen, a few years ago, at the foot of a range of hills some seven and a half miles above Wilkesboro, in Wilkes County. After a time, dissatisfied with this location, he moved five miles farther up the river and about half a mile up Beaver Creek. Again he changed his mind, choosing his final home on the upper Yadkin, just above the mouth of Beaver. It was from this beautiful region among the Alleghany foot-hills, where game and fish were plenty and his swine and cattle had good range, that Boone, crowded out by advancing civilization, eventually moved to Kentucky.

In the spring and early summer of 1767 there were fresh outbreaks on the part of the Indians. Governor Tryon had run a boundary-line between the back settlements of the Carolinas and the Cherokee hunting-grounds. But hunters and traders would persist in wandering to the west of this line, and sometimes they were killed.

In the autumn of that year Daniel Boone and a warm friend, William Hill, and possibly Squire Boone, determined to seek Kentucky, of which Finley had told him twelve years before. They crossed the mountain wall, were in the valleys of the Holston and the Clinch, and reached the head waters of the West Fork of the Big Sandy. Following down this river for a hundred miles, determined to find the Ohio, they appear to have struck a buffalo-path, along which they traveled as far as a salt-lick ten miles west of the present town of Prestonburg, on a tributary of the West (or Louisa) Fork of the Sandy, within Floyd County, in the extreme eastern part of Kentucky.

Caught in a severe snow-storm, they were compelled to camp at this lick for the entire winter. It proved to be the most profitable station that they could have selected, for buffaloes and other animals came in large numbers to lick the brackish soil, and all the hunters had to do was to “rise, kill, and eat.”

Although now considerably west of the Cumberland Mountains, the explorers were not aware that they were within the famed Kentucky; and as the country was very hilly, covered with briers which annoyed them greatly, and altogether forbidding, they despaired of reaching the promised land by this path, and in the spring returned to the Yadkin.

Chapter VI.
Alone in the Wilderness

In the winter of 1768-69 a pedler with horse and wagon wandered into the valley of the upper Yadkin, offering small wares to the settlers’ wives. This was thrifty John Finley, former fur-trader and Indian fighter, who, thirteen years before, had, as we have seen, fraternized with Boone in Braddock’s ill-fated army on the Monongahela. Finley had, in 1752, in his trade with the Indians, descended the Ohio in a canoe to the site of Louisville, accompanied by three or four voyageurs, and, with some of his dusky customers, traveled widely through the interior of Kentucky. His glowing descriptions of this beautiful land had inspired Boone to try to find it. The latter was still sorrowing over his unpromising expedition by way of the Big Sandy when, by the merest chance, the man who had fired his imagination knocked at his very door.

Throughout the winter that Finley was Daniel’s guest, he and his brother Squire were ready listeners to the pedler’s stories of the over-mountain country — tales of countless water-fowl, turkeys, deer, elk, and buffaloes, which doubtless lost nothing in the telling. The two Boones resolved to try Finley’s proposed route by way of Cumberland Gap, and the fur-trader promised to lead the way.

After the spring crops were in, Finley, Daniel Boone, and the latter’s brother-in-law, John Stuart, started from Daniel’s house upon the first of May. In their employ, as hunters and camp-keepers, were three neighbors — Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley. Each man was fully armed, clad in the usual deerskin costume of the frontier, and mounted upon a good horse; blanket or bearskin was strapped on behind the saddle, together with camp-kettle, a store of salt, and a small supply of provisions, although their chief food was to be game. Squire remained to care for the crops of the two families, and agreed to reenforce the hunters late in the autumn.

Scaling the lofty Blue Ridge, the explorers passed over Stone and Iron Mountains and reached Holston Valley, whence they proceeded through Moccasin Gap of Clinch Mountain, and crossed over intervening rivers and densely wooded hills until they came to Powell’s Valley, then the farthest limit of white settlement. Here they found a hunter’s trail which led them through Cumberland Gap. The “warriors’ path” — trodden by Indian war-parties from across the mountains — was now discovered, and this they followed by easy stages until at last they reached what is now called Station Camp Creek, a tributary of the Kentucky River, in Estill County, Ky. — so named because here was built their principal, or “station” camp, the center of their operations for many months to come.

While Boone, Finley, and Stuart made frequent explorations, and Boone in particular ascended numerous lofty hills in order to view the country, the chief occupation of the party was hunting. Throughout the summer and autumn deerskins were in their best condition. Other animals were occasionally killed to afford variety of food, but fur-bearers as a rule only furnish fine pelts in the winter season. Even in the days of abundant game the hunter was required to exercise much skill, patience, and endurance. It was no holiday task to follow this calling. Deer, especially, were difficult to obtain. The habits of this excessively cautious animal were carefully studied; the hunter must know how to imitate its various calls, to take advantage of wind and weather, and to practise all the arts of strategy.

Deerskins were, all things considered, the most remunerative of all. When roughly dressed and dried they were worth about a dollar each; as they were numerous, and a horse could carry for a long distance about a hundred such skins, the trade was considered profitable in those primitive times, when dollars were hard to obtain. Pelts of beavers, found in good condition only in the winter, were worth about two dollars and a half each, and of otters from three to five dollars. Thus, a horse-load of beaver furs, when obtainable, was worth about five times that of a load of deerskins; and if a few otters could be thrown in, the value was still greater. The skins of buffaloes, bears, and elks were too bulky to carry for long distances, and were not readily marketable. A few elk-hides were needed, however, to cut up into harness and straps, and bear- and buffalo-robes were useful for bedding.

When an animal was killed the hunter skinned it on the spot, and packed on his back the hide and the best portion of the meat. At night the meat was smoked or prepared for “jerking,” and the skins were scraped and cured. When collected at the camps, the bales of skins, protected from the weather by strips of bark, were placed upon high scaffolds, secure from bears and wolves.

Our Yadkin hunters were in the habit, each day, of dividing themselves into pairs for company and mutual aid in times of danger, usually leaving one pair behind as camp-keepers. Boone and Stuart frequently were companions upon such trips; for the former, being a man of few words, enjoyed by contrast the talkative, happy disposition of his friend. Occasionally the entire party, when the game grew timid, moved for some distance, where they would establish a new camp; but their headquarters remained at Station Camp, where were kept their principal skins, furs, and stores. In this way the time passed from June to December. Boone used to assert, in after years, that these months were the happiest of his life. The genial climate, the beauty of the country, and the entire freedom of this wild life, strongly appealed to him. Here this taciturn but good-natured man, who loved solitary adventure, was now in his element. Large packs of skins had been obtained by the little company and stored at Station Camp and their outlying shelters; and there was now a generous supply of buffalo, bear, and elk meat, venison, and turkeys, all properly jerked for the winter which was before them, with buffalo tallow and bear’s oil to serve as cooking grease.

Finley and Boone were both aware that Kentucky lay between the warring tribes of the North and the South; that through it warriors’ paths crossed in several directions; and that this, probably the finest hunting-field in North America, was a debatable land, frequently fought over by contending savages — a “dark and bloody ground” indeed. Yet thus far there had been no signs of Indians, and the Carolina hunters had almost ceased to think of them.

Toward the close of day on the twenty-second of December, while Boone and Stuart were ascending a low hill near the Kentucky River, in one of the most beautiful districts they had seen, they were suddenly surrounded and captured by a large party of Shawnese horsemen returning from an autumn hunt on Green River to their homes north of the Ohio. The two captives were forced to lead the savages to their camps, which were deliberately plundered, one after the other, of everything in them. The Shawnese, releasing their prisoners, considerately left with each hunter just enough supplies to enable him to support himself on the way back to the settlements. The white men were told what was a fact under existing treaties with the tribes — treaties, however, of which Boone and his companions probably knew nothing — that they were trespassing upon Indian hunting-grounds, and must not come again, or “the wasps and yellow-jackets will sting you severely.”

The others proposed to leave for home at once; but Boone and Stuart, enraged at having lost their year’s work and all that they had brought into the wilderness, and having no sympathy for Indian treaty rights, started out to recover their property. After two days they came up with the Shawnese, and secreting themselves in the bushes until dark, contrived to regain four or five horses and make off with them. But they, in turn, were overtaken in two days by the Indians and again made prisoners. After a week of captivity, in which they were kindly treated, they effected their escape in the dark and returned to Station Camp.

Their companions, giving them up for lost, had departed toward home, but were overtaken by the two adventurers. Boone was gratified to find with them his brother Squire, who, having gathered the fall crops, had come out with a fresh supply of horses, traps, and ammunition. He had followed the trail of his predecessors, and in the New River region was joined by Alexander Neely. Not finding Daniel and Stuart at Station Camp, and grief-stricken at the report concerning them, he was traveling homeward with the party.

Daniel, however, who had staked upon this venture almost all that he owned, did not relish the thought of returning empty-handed, now that reenforcements had arrived, and determined to stay and seek to regain his lost fortunes. Squire, Stuart, and Neely concluded also to remain, and the four were now left behind in the wilderness. On reaching the Holston Valley, Finley turned northward to seek his relatives in Pennsylvania; while Holden, Mooney, and Cooley proceeded southeastward to their Yadkin homes, carrying dismal news of the events attending this notable exploration of Kentucky.

The quartette promptly abandoned Station Camp as being dangerously near the warriors’ path, and, tradition says, built another on or near the northern bank of Kentucky River, not far from the mouth of the Red. The deer season was now over, but beavers and otters were in their prime, and soon the hunters were enjoying a profitable season. A small canoe which they built added greatly to their equipment, and they were now enabled to set their traps throughout a wide region.

Hunting in pairs, Daniel was generally accompanied by Stuart, while Neely and Squire were partners. In their wanderings the two pairs were sometimes several days without seeing each other; and frequently partners would be separated throughout the day, but at night met at some appointed spot. One day, toward the close of January or early in February (1770), Stuart did not return to the rendezvous, much to Boone’s alarm. The following day the latter discovered the embers of a fire, doubtless built by the lost man; but that was all, for Stuart was seen no more. Five years later Boone came across the bones of his light-hearted comrade in a hollow sycamore tree upon Rockcastle River — he recognized them by Stuart’s name cut upon his powder-horn. What caused Stuart’s death is a mystery to the present day; possibly he was wounded and chased by Indians to this distant spot, and died while in hiding.

Stuart’s mysterious disappearance frightened Neely, who at once left for home, thus leaving Daniel and Squire to pass the remainder of the winter in the wilderness by themselves. Dejected, but not discouraged, the brothers built a comfortable hut and continued their work. With the close of the trapping season the ammunition was nearly exhausted. Upon the first of May, a year after Daniel had left his cabin upon the upper Yadkin, Squire started out upon the return, their horses well laden with furs, skins, and jerked meat. Both men had, in their enterprise, contracted debts of considerable extent for frontier hunters, hence they were anxious to square themselves with the world, as well as to obtain more horses, ammunition, and miscellaneous supplies.

Daniel was now left alone in Kentucky, “without bread, salt, or sugar, without company of his fellow-creatures, or even a horse or dog.” In after years he acknowledged that he was at times homesick during the three months which followed, and felt deeply his absence from the wife and family to whom he was so warmly attached. But possessing a cheerful, hopeful nature, he forgot his loneliness in untrammeled enjoyment of the far-stretching wilderness.

Almost without ammunition, he could not hunt, save to obtain sufficient food, and largely spent his time in exploration. Fearing Indians, he frequently changed his location, sometimes living in shelters of bark and boughs, and again in caves; but seldom venturing to sleep in these temporary homes, preferring the thickets and the dense cane-brakes as less liable to be sought by savage prowlers.

Kentucky has a remarkably diversified landscape of densely wooded hills and valleys and broad prairie expanses. The genial climate admirably suited the philosophical wanderer. He enjoyed the exquisite beauty and stateliness of the trees — the sycamores, tulip-trees, sugar-trees, honey-locusts, coffee-trees, pawpaws, cucumber-trees, and black mulberries — and found flowers in surprising variety and loveliness. The mineral springs interested him — Big Lick, the Blue Licks, and Big Bone Lick, with its fossil remains of mastodons which had become mired when coming to lick the brackish soil. He traveled far and wide in his search for the beautiful and curious, being chiefly in the valleys of the Licking and the Kentucky, and upon the banks of the Ohio as far down as the site of Louisville, where, at the foot of the falls, he inspected the remains of an old fur trade stockade concerning which Finley had told him.

Once he saw some Indians walking upon the northern bank of the Ohio, but managed himself to keep out of sight. At another time, when on the Kentucky, he saw a savage calmly fishing from the trunk of a fallen tree. In mentioning this incident to his family, in later days, he would declare with gravity: “While I was looking at the fellow he tumbled into the river, and I saw him no more.” Probably the man of the Yadkin shot him, fearing that the fisherman might carry the news of the former’s whereabouts to a possible camp near by. On another occasion, when exploring Dick’s River, he was suddenly surrounded by Indians. Having either to surrender or to leap down the precipitous height to a bank sixty feet below, he chose to leap. Landing in the top of a small sugar-maple, he slid down the tree, and was able to escape by running under the overhanging bank and then swimming the stream. Adventures such as this gave abundant spice to the joys of solitude.

In the latter part of July Squire arrived from the settlements, having paid all their debts and with the surplus purchased sufficient supplies for another summer and fall campaign against the deer. This was highly successful. They did not lack some interesting experiences, but Indians were not again encountered; so that, when winter approached, Squire was enabled once more to leave with well-laden horses for the markets of the East. Another two months of loneliness were suffered by Daniel; but in December Squire rejoined him with horses, ammunition, and other necessaries, and the pair joyously settled down for still another winter together in the dark and lonely forests of Kentucky.

Chapter VII.
Predecessors and Contemporaries

The reader of this narrative has, of course, already discovered that Daniel Boone was neither the original white explorer of Kentucky nor the first white hunter within its limits. Many others had been there before him. It will be worth our while at this point to take a hasty review of some of the previous expeditions which had made the “dark and bloody ground” known to the world.

Probably none of the several Spanish explorations of the sixteenth century along the Mississippi River and through the Gulf States had touched Kentucky. But during the seventeenth century both the French in Canada and the English on the Atlantic tidewater came to have fairly accurate notions of the country lying immediately to the south of the Ohio River. As early as 1650 Governor Berkeley, of Virginia, made a vain attempt to cross the Alleghany barrier in search of the Mississippi, concerning which he had heard from Indians; and we know that at the same time the French, especially the Jesuit missionaries, were looking eagerly in that direction. A few years later Colonel Abraham Wood, of Virginia, discovered streams which poured into the Ohio and the Mississippi. Just a century before Boone’s great hunt, John Lederer, also of Virginia, explored for a considerable distance beyond the mountains. The following year Thomas Batts and his party proclaimed King Charles II upon New River, the upper waters of the Great Kanawha — twelve months before La Salle took possession of all Western waters for the French king, and nineteen before Marquette and Joliet discovered the Mississippi.

There is a tradition that in 1678, only five years after the voyage of Marquette and Joliet, a party of New Englanders ventured into the Western wilderness as far as New Mexico. The later French expeditions of La Salle, Hennepin, and D’Iberville are well known. Several Englishmen traded with Indians upon the Mississippi before the close of the seventeenth century; by 1719 the English were so numerous that Governor Keith, of Pennsylvania, suggested that four forts be built for their protection in the Wabash and Illinois countries. We hear of a French expedition investigating Big Bone Lick, in Kentucky, in 1735; and other visits were successively made by bands of their compatriots until the downfall of New France, over a quarter of a century later. In 1742 John Howard and Peter Salling, of Virginia, were exploring in Kentucky; six years after them Dr. Thomas Walker made a notable expedition through the same country; and two years after that Washington’s backwoods friend, Christopher Gist, was on the site of Louisville selecting lands for the Ohio Company, which had a large grant upon the Ohio River.

Henceforward, border chronicles abound with reports of the adventures of English fur-traders, hunters, and land-viewers, all along the Ohio River and tributary waters above Louisville. Among these early adventurers was our friend Finley, whose experiences in Kentucky dated from 1752, and who piloted Boone to the promised land through the gateway of Cumberland Gap. The subsequent Indian wars, with the expeditions into the upper Ohio Valley by Generals Braddock, Forbes, and Bouquet, made the country still better known; and settlers were soon rushing in by scores, although as yet none of them appear to have made clearings within Kentucky itself.

Officers and soldiers who had served in the French and Indian War were given liberal grants of land in the West. Washington had not only his own grant, as the principal officer upon the southwest frontier, but was agent for a number of fellow-soldiers, and in 1767 went to the Ohio River to select and survey claims. At the very time when Boone was engaged upon his fruitless expedition down the Big Sandy, Washington was making the first surveys in Kentucky on both the Little and Big Sandy. Again, in 1770, when Boone was exploring the Kentucky wilderness, Washington was surveying extensive tracts along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha, and planning for a large colony upon his own lands. The outbreak of the Revolution caused the great man to turn his attention from the over-mountain region to the defense of his country. Had he been left to carry out his plans, he would doubtless have won fame as the most energetic of Western pioneers.

It will be remembered that when Boone and his companions passed through Cumberland Gap in the early summer of 1769, they found the well-worn trail of other hunters who had preceded them from the settlements. The men of the Yadkin Valley were not the only persons seeking game in Kentucky that year. At about the time when Boone was bidding farewell to his family, Hancock and Richard Taylor, Abraham Hempinstall, and one Barbour, frontiersmen of the same type, started from their homes in Orange County, Va., to explore the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. They descended from Pittsburg in a boat, explored Kentucky, and proceeded into Arkansas, where they camped and hunted during the following winter. The next year two of them traveled eastward to Florida, and thence northwardly to their homes; the others stayed in Arkansas for another year, and returned by sea from New Orleans to New York.

Simultaneously with the expeditions of Boone and the Taylors, a party of twenty or more adventurous hunters and explorers was formed in the New River region, in the Valley of Virginia. They set out in June (1769), piloted by Uriah Stone, who had been in Kentucky three years before. Entering by way of the now familiar Cumberland Gap, these men had experiences quite similar to those of Boone and his comrades. At some of the Kentucky salt-licks they found herds of buffaloes numbering up in the thousands — at one lick a hundred acres were densely massed with these bulky animals, who exhibited no fear until the wind blew from the hunters toward them, and then they would “dash wildly away in large droves and disappear.” Like Boone’s party, they also were the victims of Cherokees, who plundered their camps, and after leaving them some guns and a little ammunition, ordered them out of the country. The New River party being large, however, some of their number were deputed to go to the settlements and bring back fresh supplies, so that they could finish their hunt. After further adventures with Indians half of the hunters returned home; while the others wandered into Tennessee and as far as the Ozark Mountains, finally reaching New River through Georgia and the Carolinas. Another Virginian, named John McCulloch, who courted the perils of exploration, was in Kentucky in the summer of 1769 with a white man-servant and a negro. He visited the site of Terre Haute, Ind., and went by canoe to Natchez and New Orleans, and at length reached Philadelphia by sea.

But the most famous of all the expeditions of the period was that of the “Long Hunters,” as they have come to be known in Western history. Inspired by the favorable reports of Stone and others, about forty of the most noted and successful hunters of New River and Holston Valleys formed, in the summer of 1770, a company for hunting and trapping to the west of Cumberland Mountains. Under the leadership of two of the best woodsmen of the region, Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs, and including several of Stone’s party, they set out in early autumn fully prepared for meeting Indians and living on game. Each man took with him three packhorses, rifles, ammunition, traps, dogs, blankets, and salt, and was dressed in the deerskin costume of the times.

Pushing on through Cumberland Gap, the adventurers were soon in the heart of Kentucky. In accordance with custom, they visited some of the best licks — a few of which were probably first seen by them — for here wild beasts were always to be found in profusion. At Knob Licks they beheld from an eminence which overlooked the springs “what they estimated at largely over a thousand animals, including buffaloe, elk, bear, and deer, with many wild turkies scattered among them — all quite restless, some playing, and others busily employed in licking the earth; but at length they took flight and bounded away all in one direction, so that in the brief space of a couple of minutes not an animal was to be seen.” Within an area of many acres, the animals had eaten the salty earth to a depth of several feet.

Successful in a high degree, the party ceased operations in February, and had completed preparations for sending a large shipment of skins, furs, and “jerk” to the settlements, when, in their temporary absence, roving Cherokees robbed them of much of their stores and spoiled the greater part of the remainder. “Fifteen hundred skins gone to ruination!” was the legend which one of them carved upon the bark of a neighboring tree, a record to which were appended the initials of each member of the party. A series of disasters followed, in the course of which two men were carried off by Indians and never again seen, and others fled for home. Those remaining, having still much ammunition and the horses, continued their hunt, chiefly upon the Green and Cumberland Rivers, and in due time brought together another store of peltries, almost as extensive as that despoiled by the savages.

Not long after the robbery, when the Long Hunters were upon Green River, one of the parties into which the band was divided were going into camp for the night, when a singular noise was heard proceeding from a considerable distance in the forest. The leader, Caspar Mausker, commanded silence on the part of his comrades, and himself crept cautiously from tree to tree in the direction of the sound. Imagine his surprise and amusement to find “a man bare-headed, stretched flat upon his back on a deerskin spread on the ground, singing merrily at the top of his voice!” The singer was our hero, Daniel Boone, who, regardless of possible Indian neighbors, was thus enjoying himself while awaiting Squire’s belated return to camp. Like most woodsmen of his day and ours, Boone was fond of singing, in his rude way, as well as of relating tales of stirring adventure. In such manner were many hours whiled away around the camp-fires of wilderness hunters.

The Boones at once joined and spent some time with the Long Hunters, no doubt delighted at this opportunity of once more mingling with men of their kind. Among their amusements was that of naming rivers, creeks, and hills after members of the party; many of these names are still preserved upon the map of Kentucky. At one time they discovered that some French hunters from the Illinois country had recently visited a lick to kill buffaloes for their tongues and tallow, which they had loaded into a keel-boat and taken down the Cumberland. In after years one of the Long Hunters declared that this wholesale slaughter was so great “that one could walk for several hundred yards in and around the lick on buffaloes’ skulls and bones, with which the whole flat around the lick was bleached.”

It was not until August that the Long Hunters returned to their homes, after a profitable absence of eleven months. But the Boone brothers left their comrades in March and headed for the Yadkin, with horses now well laden with spoils of the chase. They were deeply in debt for their latest supplies, but were returning in light heart, cheered with the prospect of settling their accounts and being able to revisit Kentucky in good condition. But in Powell’s Valley, near Cumberland Gap, where they might well have supposed that small chance of danger remained, they were suddenly set upon by a war party of Northern Indians who had been raiding the white settlers as well as their Southern foes, the Cherokees and Catawbas. Roughly handled and robbed of their packs, the unfortunate hunters reached the Yadkin in no happy frame of mind. Daniel had been absent for two years, and was now poorer than when he left home. He used to say, however, in after years, that having at last seen Kentucky, his ideal of an earthly paradise, that served as solace for his woes.

Chapter VIII.
The Hero of Clinch Valley

While Daniel Boone had been hunting and exploring amid the deep forests and waving greenswards of Kentucky, important events had been taking place in the settlements. The colonists along the Atlantic tidewater had become so crowded that there were no longer any free lands in that region; and settlers’ cabins in the western uplands of Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia had so multiplied that now much of the best land there had also been taken up. The far-outlying frontier upon which the Boones and Bryans had reared their rude log huts nearly a quarter of a century before, no longer abounded in game and in free pastures for roving herds; indeed, the frontier was now pushed forward to the west-flowing streams — to the head waters of the Watauga, Clinch, Powell, French Broad, Holston, and Nolichucky, all of them affluents of the Tennessee, and to the Monongahela and other tributaries of the upper Ohio.

The rising tide of population demanded more room to the westward. The forbidding mountain-ranges had long hemmed in the restless borderers; but the dark-skinned wilderness tribes had formed a still more serious barrier, as, with rifles and tomahawks purchased from white traders, they terrorized the slowly advancing outposts of civilization. With the French government no longer in control of Canada and the region east of the Mississippi — although French-Canadian woodsmen were freely employed by the British Indian Department — with the consequent quieting of Indian forays, with increased knowledge of the over-mountain passes, and with the strong push of population from behind, there had arisen a general desire to scale the hills, and beyond them to seek exemption from tax-gatherers, free lands, and the abundant game concerning which the Kentucky hunters had brought glowing reports.

Upon the defeat of the French, the English king had issued a proclamation (1763) forbidding his “loving subjects” to settle to the west of the mountains. The home government was no doubt actuated in this by two motives: first, a desire to preserve the wilderness for the benefit of the growing fur trade, which brought wealth to many London merchants; second, a fear that borderers who pushed beyond the mountains might not only be beyond the reach of English trade, but also beyond English political control. But the frontiersmen were already too far distant to have much regard for royal proclamations. The king’s command appears to have had no more effect than had he, like one of his predecessors, bade the ocean tide rise no higher.

In 1768, at Fort Stanwix, N.Y., the Iroquois of that province, whose war parties had raided much of the country between the Hudson and the Mississippi, surrendered what shadowy rights they might be supposed to have over all lands lying between the Ohio and the Tennessee. Meanwhile, at the South, the Cherokees had agreed to a frontier which opened to settlement eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.

But, without waiting for these treaties, numerous schemes had been proposed in England and the Atlantic coast colonies for the settlement of Kentucky and the lands of the upper Ohio. Most of these projects failed, even the more promising of them being checked by the opening of the Revolutionary War; but their existence showed how general was the desire of English colonists to occupy those fertile Western lands which explorers like Gist, Washington, the Boones, and the Long Hunters had now made familiar to the world. The new treaties strengthened this desire, so that when Daniel and Squire Boone reached their homes upon the Yadkin the subject of Western settlement was uppermost in the minds of the people.

The land excitement was, however, less intense in North Carolina than in the Valley of Virginia and other mountain troughs to the north and northeast. At Boone’s home there was unrest of a more serious character. The tax-gatherers were arousing great popular discontent because of unlawful and extortionate demands, and in some cases Governor Tryon had come to blows with the regulators who stood for the people’s rights.

For two and a half years after his return Boone quietly conducted his little farm, and, as of old, made long hunting trips in autumn and winter, occasionally venturing — sometimes alone, sometimes with one or two companions — far west into Kentucky, once visiting French Lick, on the Cumberland, where he found several French hunters. There is reason to believe that in 1772 he moved to the Watauga Valley, but after living there for a time went back to the Yadkin. Early in the following year he accompanied Benjamin Cutbirth and others as far as the present Jessamine County, Ky., and from this trip returned fired with quickened zeal for making a settlement in the new country.

The spring and summer were spent in active preparations. He enlisted the cooperation of Captain William Russell, the principal pioneer in the Clinch Valley; several of the Bryans, whose settlement was now sixty-five miles distant, also agreed to join him; and five other families in his own neighborhood engaged to join the expedition. The Bryan party, numbering forty men, some of them from the Valley of Virginia and Powell’s Valley, were not to be accompanied by their families, as they preferred to go in advance and prepare homes before making a final move. But Boone and the other men of the upper Yadkin took with them their wives and children; most of them sold their farms, as did Boone, thus burning their bridges behind them. Arranging to meet the Bryan contingent in Powell’s Valley, Boone’s party left for the West upon the twenty-fifth of September, 1773 — fifty-six years after old George Boone had departed from England for the Pennsylvania frontier near Philadelphia, and twenty-three after the family had set out for the new southwest frontier on the Yadkin.

Reaching Powell’s, Boone went into camp to await the rear party, his riding and packhorses hoppled and belled, after the custom of such caravans, and their small herd of cattle properly guarded in a meadow. His eldest son, James, now a boy of sixteen years, was sent with two men, with pack-animals, across country to notify Russell and to secure some flour and farming tools. They were returning laden, in company with Russell’s son Henry, a year older than James, two of Russell’s negro slaves, and two or three white workpeople, when, missing their path, they went into camp for the night only three miles from Boone’s quarters. At daybreak they were attacked by a Shawnese war party and all killed except a white laborer and a negro. This pathetic tragedy created such consternation among the movers that, despite Boone’s entreaties to go forward, all of them returned to Virginia and Carolina. Daniel and his family, no longer having a home on the Yadkin, would not retreat, and took up their quarters in an empty cabin upon the farm of Captain David Gass, seven or eight miles from Russell’s, upon Clinch River. Throughout this sorrowful winter the Boones were supported from their stock of cattle and by means of Daniel’s unerring rifle.

It was long before the intrepid pioneers could again take up their line of march. Ever since the Bouquet treaty of 1764 there had been more or less disturbance upon the frontiers. During all these years, although there was no open warfare between whites and reds, many scores of lives had been lost. Indians had wantonly plundered and murdered white men, and the latter had been quite as merciless toward the savages. Whenever a member of one race met a man of the other the rifle was apt to be at once brought into play. Meanwhile, armed parties of surveyors and land speculators were swarming into Kentucky, notching the trees for landmarks, and giving evidence to apprehensive tribesmen that the hordes of civilization were upon them. In 1773 George Rogers Clark, afterward the most famous of border leaders, had staked a claim at the mouth of Fishing Creek, on the Ohio; Washington had, this summer, descended the river to the same point; while at the Falls of the Ohio, and upon interior waters of the Kentucky wilderness, other parties were laying ambitious plans for the capitals of new colonies.

In the following spring the Cherokees and Shawnese, now wrought to a high pitch of ill temper, combined for onslaughts on the advancing frontiersmen. The wanton murder by border ruffians of Chief John Logan’s family, near Mingo Junction, on the Ohio, was the match which, in early summer, fired the tinder. The Mingos, ablaze with the fire of vengeance, carried the war-pipe through the neighboring villages; runners were sent in every direction to rouse the tribes; tomahawks were unearthed, war-posts were planted; messages of defiance were sent to the “Virginians,” as all frontiersmen were generally called by the Western Indians; and in a few days the border war to which history has given the name of Lord Dunmore, then governor of Virginia, was in full swing from Cumberland Gap to Fort Pitt, from the Alleghanies to the Wabash.

Its isolation at first protected the Valley of the Clinch. The commandant of the southwest militia — which comprised every boy or man capable of bearing arms — was Colonel William Preston; under him was Major Arthur Campbell; the principal man in the Clinch Valley was Boone’s friend, Russell. When, in June, the border captains were notified by Lord Dunmore that the war was now on, forts were erected in each of the mountain valleys, and scouts sent out along the trails and streams to ascertain the whereabouts of the enemy.

There were in Kentucky, at this time, several surveying parties which could not obtain news by way of the Ohio because of the blockade maintained by the Shawnese. It became necessary to notify them overland, and advise their retreat to the settlements by way of Cumberland Gap. Russell having been ordered by Preston to employ “two faithful woodsmen” for this purpose, chose Daniel Boone and Michael Stoner. “If they are alive,” wrote Russell to his colonel, “it is indisputable but Boone must find them.” Leaving the Clinch on June twenty-seventh, the two envoys were at Harrodsburg before July eighth. There they found James Harrod and thirty-four other men laying off a large town, in which they proposed to give each inhabitant a half-acre in-lot and a ten-acre out-lot. Boone, who had small capacity for business, but in land was something of a speculator, registered as a settler, and in company with a neighbor put up a cabin for his future occupancy. This done, he and Stoner hurried on down the Kentucky River to its mouth, and thence to the Falls of the Ohio (site of Louisville), notifying several bands of surveyors and town-builders of their danger. After an absence of sixty-one days they were back again upon the Clinch, having traveled eight hundred miles through a practically unbroken forest, experienced many dangers from Indians, and overcome natural difficulties almost without number.

Meanwhile Lord Dunmore, personally unpopular but an energetic and competent military manager, had sent out an army of nearly three thousand backwoodsmen against the Shawnese north of the Ohio. One wing of this army, led by the governor himself, went by way of Fort Pitt and descended the Ohio; among its members was George Rogers Clark. The other wing, commanded by General Andrew Lewis, included the men of the Southwest, eleven hundred strong; they were to descend the Great Kanawha and rendezvous with the northern wing at Point Pleasant, at the junction of the Kanawha and the Ohio.

When Boone arrived upon the Clinch he found that Russell and most of the other militiamen of the district had departed upon the campaign. With a party of recruits, the great hunter started out to overtake the expedition, but was met by orders to return and aid in defending his own valley; for the drawing off of the militia by Dunmore had left the southwest frontiers in weak condition. During September the settlers upon the Clinch suffered much apprehension; the depredations of the tribesmen were not numerous, but several men were either wounded or captured.

In a letter written upon the sixth of October, Major Campbell gives a list of forts upon the Clinch: “Blackmore’s, sixteen men, Sergeant Moore commanding; Moore’s, twenty miles above, twenty men, Lieutenant Boone commanding; Russell’s, four miles above, twenty men, Sergeant W. Poage commanding; Glade Hollow, twelve miles above, fifteen men, Sergeant John Dunkin commanding; Elk Garden, fourteen miles above, eighteen men, Sergeant John Kinkead commanding; Maiden Spring, twenty-three miles above, five men, Sergeant John Crane commanding; Whitton’s Big Crab Orchard, twelve miles above, three men, Ensign John Campbell, of Rich Valley, commanding.” During this month Boone and his little garrison made frequent sallies against the enemy, and now and then fought brief but desperate skirmishes. He appears to have been by far the most active commander in the valley, and when neighboring forts were attacked his party of well-trained riflemen generally furnished the relief necessary to raise the siege. “Mr. Boone,” writes Campbell to Preston, “is very diligent at Castle’s-woods, and keeps up good order.” His conduct is frequently alluded to in the military correspondence of that summer; Campbell and other leaders exhibited in their references to our hero a respectful and even deferential tone. An eye-witness of some of these stirring scenes has left us a description of Daniel Boone, now forty years of age, in which it is stated that his was then a familiar figure throughout the valley as he hurried to and fro upon his military duties “dressed in deerskin colored black, and his hair plaited and clubbed up.”

Upon the tenth of October, Cornstalk, a famous Shawnese chief, taking advantage of Dunmore’s failure to join the southern wing, led against Lewis’s little army encamped at Point Pleasant a thousand picked warriors gathered from all parts of the Northwest. Here, upon the wooded eminence at the junction of the two rivers, was waged from dawn until dusk one of the most bloody and stubborn hand-to-hand battles ever fought between Indians and whites. It is hard to say who displayed the best generalship, Cornstalk or Lewis. The American savage was a splendid fighter; although weak in discipline he could competently plan a battle. The tactics of surprise were his chief resource, and these are legitimate even in civilized warfare; but he could also make a determined contest in the open, and when, as at Point Pleasant, the opposing numbers were nearly equal, the result was often slow of determination. Desperately courageous, pertinacious, with a natural aptitude for war combined with consummate treachery, cruelty, and cunning, it is small wonder that the Indian long offered a formidable barrier to the advance of civilization. In early Virginia, John Smith noticed that in Indian warfare the whites won at the expense of losses far beyond those suffered by the tribesmen; and here at Point Pleasant, while the “Long Knives” gained the day, the number of their dead and wounded was double that of the casualties sustained by Cornstalk’s painted band.

The victory at Point Pleasant practically closed the war upon the border. Boone had been made a captain in response to a popular petition that the hero of Clinch Valley be thus honored, and was given charge of the three lower forts; but there followed only a few alarms, and upon the twentieth of November he and his brother militiamen of the region received their discharge. The war had cost Virginia £10,000 sterling, many valuable lives had been sacrificed, and an incalculable amount of suffering and privation had been occasioned all along the three hundred and fifty miles of American frontier. But the Shawnese had been humbled, the Cherokees had retired behind the new border line, and a lasting peace appeared to be assured.

In the following January Captain Boone, true son of the wilderness, was celebrating his freedom from duties incident to war’s alarms by a solitary hunt upon the banks of Kentucky River.

Chapter IX.
The Settlement of Kentucky

Kentucky had so long been spasmodically occupied and battled over by Shawnese, Iroquois, and Cherokees, that it can not be said that any of them had well-defined rights over its soil. Not until white men appeared anxious to settle there did the tribes begin to assert their respective claims, in the hope of gaining presents at the treaties whereat they were asked to make cessions. The whites, on their part, when negotiating for purchases, were well aware of the shadowy character of these claims; but, when armed with a signed deed of cession, they had something tangible upon which thenceforth to base their own claims of proprietorship. There was therefore much insincerity upon both sides. It is well to understand this situation in studying the history of Kentucky settlement.

Colonel Richard Henderson was one of the principal judges in North Carolina, a scholarly, talented man, eminent in the legal profession; although but thirty-nine years of age, he wielded much influence. Knowing and respecting Daniel Boone, Henderson was much impressed by the former’s enthusiastic reports concerning the soil, climate, and scenery of Kentucky; and, acting solely upon this information, resolved to establish a colony in that attractive country. He associated with himself three brothers, Nathaniel, David, and Thomas Hart, the last-named of whom in later life wrote that he “had known Boone of old, when poverty and distress held him fast by the hand; and in those wretched circumstances he had ever found him a noble and generous soul, despising everything mean.” Their proposed colony was styled Transylvania, and the association of proprietors the Transylvania Company.

It will be remembered that in the treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) the Iroquois of New York had ceded to the English crown their pretensions to lands lying between the Ohio and the Tennessee. The Transylvania Company, however, applied to the Cherokees, because this was the tribe commanding the path from Virginia and the Carolinas to Kentucky. In March, 1775, a great council was held at Sycamore Shoals, on the Watauga River, between the company and twelve hundred Cherokees who had been brought in for the purpose by Boone. For $50,000 worth of cloths, clothing, utensils, ornaments, and firearms, the Indians ceded to Henderson and his partners an immense grant including all the country lying between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers, also a path of approach from the east, through Powell’s Valley. At this council were some of the most prominent Cherokee chiefs and southwestern frontiersmen.

When the goods came to be distributed among the Indians it was found that, although they filled a large cabin and looked very tempting in bulk, there was but little for each warrior, and great dissatisfaction arose. One Cherokee, whose portion was a shirt, declared that in one day, upon this land, he could have killed deer enough to buy such a garment; to surrender his hunting-ground for this trifle naturally seemed to him a bad bargain. For the safety of the pioneers the chiefs could give no guarantee; they warned Boone, who appears to have acted as spokesman for the company, that “a black cloud hung over this land,” warpaths crossed it from north to south, and settlers would surely get killed; for such results the Cherokees must not be held responsible.

This was not promising. Neither was the news, now received, that Governors Martin of North Carolina, and Dunmore of Virginia had both of them issued proclamations against the great purchase. The former had called Henderson and his partners an “infamous Company of Land Pyrates”; and they were notified that this movement was in violation of the king’s proclamation of 1763, forbidding Western settlements.

The company, relying upon popular sympathy and their great distance from tidewater seats of government, proceeded without regard to these proclamations. Boone, at the head of a party of about thirty enlisted men, some of them the best backwoodsmen in the country, was sent ahead to mark a path through the forest to Kentucky River, and there establish a capital for the new colony. They encountered many difficulties, especially when traveling through cane-brakes and brush; and once, while asleep, were attacked by Indians, who killed a negro servant and wounded two of the party. Boone won hearty commendation for his skill and courage throughout the expedition, which finally arrived at its destination on the sixth of April. This was Big Lick, on Kentucky River, just below the mouth of Otter Creek. Here it was decided to build a town to be called Boonesborough, to serve as the capital of Transylvania. The site was “a plain on the south side of the river, wherein was a lick with sulphur springs strongly impregnated.”

To Felix Walker, one of the pioneers, we are indebted for the details of this notable colonizing expedition, set forth in a narrative which is still preserved. “On entering the plain,” he writes, “we were permitted to view a very interesting and romantic sight. A number of buffaloes, of all sizes, supposed to be between two and three hundred, made off from the lick in every direction: some running, some walking, others loping slowly and carelessly, with young calves playing, skipping, and bounding through the plain. Such a sight some of us never saw before, nor perhaps ever may again.” A fort was commenced, and a few cabins “strung along the river-bank;” but it was long before the stronghold was completed, for, now that the journey was at an end, Boone’s men had become callous to danger.

Meanwhile Henderson was proceeding slowly from the settlements with thirty men and several wagons loaded with goods and tools. Delayed from many causes, they at last felt obliged to leave the encumbering wagons in Powell’s Valley. Pushing forward, they were almost daily met by parties of men and boys returning home from Kentucky bearing vague reports of Indian forays. This resulted in Henderson losing many of his own followers from desertion. Arriving at Boonesborough on the twentieth of April, the relief party was “saluted by a running fire of about twenty-five guns.” Some of Boone’s men had, in the general uneasiness, also deserted, and others had scattered throughout the woods, hunting, exploring, or surveying on their own account.

The method of surveying then in vogue upon the Western frontier was of the crudest, although it must be acknowledged that any system more formal might, at that stage of our country’s growth, have prevented rapid settlement. Each settler or land speculator was practically his own surveyor. With a compass and a chain, a few hours’ work would suffice to mark the boundaries of a thousand-acre tract. There were as yet no adequate maps of the country, and claims overlapped each other in the most bewildering manner. A speculator who “ran out” a hundred thousand acres might, without knowing it, include in his domain a half-dozen claims previously surveyed by modest settlers who wanted but a hundred acres each. A man who paid the land-office fees might “patent” any land he pleased and have it recorded, the colony, and later the State, only guaranteeing such entries as covered land not already patented. This overlapping, conscious or unconscious, at last became so perplexing that thousands of vexatious lawsuits followed, some of which are still unsettled; and even to-day in Kentucky there are lands whose ownership is actually unknown, which pay no taxes and support only squatters who can not be turned out — possibly some of it, lying between patented tracts, by chance has never been entered at all. Nobody can now say. Thus it was that we find our friend Daniel Boone quickly transformed from a wilderness hunter into a frontier surveyor. Before Henderson’s arrival he had laid off the town site into lots of two acres each. These were now drawn at a public lottery; while those who wished larger tracts within the neighborhood were able to obtain them by promising to plant a crop of corn and pay to the Transylvania Company a quit-rent of two English shillings for each hundred acres.

A Survey Note by Boone. Reduced facsimile from his field-books in possession of Wisconsin State Historical Society. A Survey Note by Boone.
Reduced facsimile from his field-books in possession of Wisconsin State Historical Society.

There were now four settlements in the Transylvania grant: Boonesborough; Harrodsburg, fifty miles west, with about a hundred men; Boiling Spring, some six or seven miles from Harrodsburg; and St. Asaph. The crown lands to the north and east of the Kentucky, obtained by the Fort Stanwix treaty, contained two small settlements; forty miles north of Boonesborough was Hinkson’s, later known as Ruddell’s Station, where were about nineteen persons; lower down the Kentucky, also on the north side, was Willis Lee’s settlement, near the present Frankfort; and ranging at will through the crown lands were several small parties of “land-jobbers,” surveyors, and explorers, laying off the claims of militia officers who had fought in the Indian wars, and here and there building cabins to indicate possession.

Henderson had no sooner arrived than he prepared for a convention, at which the people should adopt a form of government for the colony and elect officers. This was held at Boonesborough, in the open air, under a gigantic elm, during the week commencing Tuesday, the twenty-third of May. There were eighteen delegates, representing each of the four settlements south of the Kentucky. Among them were Daniel and Squire Boone, the former of whom proposed laws for the preservation of game and for improving the breed of horses; to the latter fell the presentation of rules for preserving the cattle-ranges. The compact finally agreed upon between the colonists and the proprietors declared “the powers of the one and the liberties of the others,” and was “the earliest form of government in the region west of the Alleghanies.” It provided for “perfect religious freedom and general toleration,” militia and judicial systems, and complete liberty on the part of the settlers to conduct colonial affairs according to their needs. This liberal and well-digested plan appeared to please both Henderson and the settlers. But the opposition of the governors, the objections raised by the Assembly of Virginia, of which Kentucky was then a part, and finally, the outbreak of the Revolution, which put an end to proprietary governments in America, caused the downfall of the Transylvania Company. The Boonesborough legislative convention met but once more — in December, to elect a surveyor-general.

The May meeting had no sooner adjourned than Transylvania began again to lose its population. Few of the pioneers who had come out with Boone and Henderson, or had since wandered into the district, were genuine home-seekers. Many appear to have been mere adventurers, out for the excitement of the expedition and to satisfy their curiosity, who either returned home or wandered farther into the woods to seek fresh experiences of wild life; others had deliberately intended first to stake out claims in the neighborhood of the new settlements and then return home to look after their crops, and perhaps move to Kentucky in the autumn; others there were who, far removed from their families, proved restless; while many became uneasy because of Indian outrages, reports of which soon began to be circulated. Henderson wrote cheerful letters to his partners at home, describing the country as a paradise; but by the end of June, when Boone returned to the East for salt, Harrodsburg and Boiling Spring were almost deserted, while Boonesborough could muster but ten or twelve “guns,” as men or boys capable of fighting Indians were called in the militia rolls.

The infant colony of Kentucky had certainly reached a crisis in its career. Game was rapidly becoming more scarce, largely because of careless, inexperienced hunters who wounded more than they killed, and killed more than was needed for food; the frightened buffaloes had now receded so far west that they were several days’ journey from Boonesborough. Yet game was still the staff of life. Captain Floyd, the surveyor-general, wrote to Colonel Preston: “I must hunt or starve.”

As the summer wore away and crops in the Eastern settlements were gathered, there was a considerable increase in the population. Many men who, in later days, were to exert a powerful influence in Kentucky now arrived — George Rogers Clark, the principal Western hero of the Revolution; Simon Kenton, famous throughout the border as hunter, scout, and Indian fighter; Benjamin Logan, William Whitley, the Lewises, Campbells, Christians, Prestons, MacDowells, McAfees, Hite, Bowman, Randolph, Todd, McClellan, Benton, Patterson — all of them names familiar in Western history.

In the first week of September Boone arrived with his wife and family and twenty young men — “twenty-one guns,” the report reads; Squire and his family soon followed; four Bryans, their brothers-in-law, came at the head of thirty men from the Yadkin; and, at the same time, Harrodsburg was reached by several other families who had, like the Boones, come on horseback through Cumberland Gap and Powell’s Valley. This powerful reenforcement of pioneers, most of whom proposed to stay, had largely been attracted by Henderson’s advertisements in Virginia newspapers offering terms of settlement on Transylvania lands. “Any person,” said the announcement, “who will settle on and inhabit the same before the first day of June, 1776, shall have the privilege of taking up and surveying for himself five hundred acres, and for each tithable person he may carry with him and settle there, two hundred and fifty acres, on the payment of fifty shillings sterling per hundred, subject to a yearly quit-rent of two shillings, like money, to commence in the year 1780.” Toward the end of November Henderson himself, who had gone on a visit to Carolina, returned with forty men, one of whom was Colonel Arthur Campbell, a prominent settler in the Holston Valley.

This increase of population, which had been noticeable throughout the autumn and early winter, received a sudden check, however, two days before Christmas, when the Indians, who had been friendly for several months past, began again to annoy settlers, several being either killed or carried into captivity. This gave rise to a fresh panic, in the course of which many fled to the east of the mountains.

During the year about five hundred persons from the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina had visited and explored Kentucky; but now, at the close of December, the population of all the settlements did not aggregate over two hundred. The recent outbreak had much to do with this situation of affairs; but there were other causes conspiring to disturb the minds of the people and postpone the growth of settlement — the clashing of interests between the Transylvania Company and the governors of Virginia and North Carolina, uncertainty as to the possibilities of a general Indian war, the threatened rupture between the colonies and the English crown, and the alarming scarcity of provisions and ammunition throughout Kentucky.

Nevertheless, over nine hundred entries had been made in the Transylvania land-office at Boonesborough, embracing 560,000 acres, and most of these tracts were waiting to be surveyed; two hundred and thirty acres of corn had been successfully raised; horses, hogs, and poultry had been introduced, and apple- and peach-trees had been started at several settlements. The germ of a colony was firmly planted, laws had been made, the militia had been organized, civil and military officers had been commissioned, and in the face of several slight Indian attacks the savages had been repelled and the country maintained. Most promising of all, there were now twelve women in the country, all of them heads of families.

The principal pioneers were nearly all of sturdy Scotch-Irish blood, men of sterling merit, intensely devoted to the cause of American liberty, and destined to contribute powerfully to its aid in the great war which had now begun, and concerning which messengers from over the mountains had during the year brought them scanty information.

Chapter X.
Two Years of Darkness

With the opening of the year 1776 Daniel and Squire Boone were employed for several weeks as hunters or assistants to a party of surveyors sent by the Transylvania Company to the Falls of the Ohio, in the vicinity of which Henderson and his friends had taken up seventy thousand acres of land. They met no Indians and saw plenty of game; but returned to find that the settlers were indignant because of this wholesale preemption by the proprietors of the colony in a neighborhood where it was now felt the chief city in Kentucky was sure to be planted. In response to this clamor Henderson promised that hereafter, in that locality, only small tracts should be granted to individuals, and that a town should at once be laid out at the Falls; but the scanty supply of powder and provisions, and the company’s growing troubles with the Virginia Assembly, prevented the execution of this project.

In the spring newcomers everywhere appeared. In order to please the people of Harrodsburg, now the largest settlement, who were disposed to be critical, the company’s land-office was moved thither, and it at once entered upon a flourishing business. Not only did many Virginians and Carolinians come in on horseback over the “Wilderness Road,” as the route through Cumberland Gap was now styled, but hundreds also descended the Ohio in boats from the new settlements on the Monongahela, and from those farther east in Pennsylvania.

While the horsemen of the Wilderness Road generally settled in Transylvania, those journeying by boat were chiefly interested in the crown lands north of the Kentucky; through these they ranged at will, building rude pens, half-faced cabins, and log huts, as convenience dictated, and planting small crops of corn in order to preempt their claims. The majority, however, after making sometimes as many as twenty such claims each, often upon land already surveyed on militia officers’ warrants, returned home at the close of the season, seeking to sell their fictitious holdings to actual settlers. Of course the unscrupulous conduct of these “claim-jumping” speculators led to numerous quarrels. John Todd, of Harrodsburg, wrote to a friend: “I am afraid to lose sight of my house lest some invader should take possession.”

It was difficult, even for those who came to settle, to get down to hard work during those earliest years. Never was there a more beautiful region than the Kentucky wilderness. Both old and new settlers were fond of roaming through this wonderland of forests and glades and winding rivers, where the nights were cool and refreshing and the days filled with harmonies of sound and sight and smell. Hill and valley, timberland and thicket, meadow and prairie, grasslands and cane-brake — these abounded on every hand, in happy distribution of light and shadow. The soil was extremely fertile; there were many open spots fitted for immediate cultivation; the cattle-ranges were of the best, for nowhere was cane more abundant; game was more plentiful than men’s hopes had ever before conceived — of turkeys, bears, deer, and buffaloes it seemed, for a time, as if the supply must always far excelled any possible demand. It is small wonder that the imaginations of the pioneers were fired with dreams of the future, that they saw in fancy great cities springing up in this new world of the West, and wealth pouring into the laps of those who could first obtain a foothold. Thus, in that beautiful spring of 1776, did Kentuckians revel in the pleasures of hope, and cast to the winds all thought of the peril and toil by which alone can man conquer a savage-haunted wilderness.

But the “dark cloud” foretold at the Watauga treaty soon settled upon the land. Incited by British agents — for the Revolution was now on — the Cherokees on the south and the Shawnese and Mingos on the north declared war upon the American borderers. The Kentuckians were promptly warned by messengers from the East. The “cabiners,” as claim speculators were called by actual settlers; the wandering fur-traders, most of whom were shabby rascals, whose example corrupted the savages, and whose conduct often led to outbreaks of race hostility; and the irresponsible hunters, who were recklessly killing or frightening off the herds of game — all of these classes began, with the mutterings of conflict, to draw closer to the settlements; while many hurried back to their old homes, carrying exaggerated reports of the situation.

Meanwhile, opposition to the Transylvania proprietors was fast developing. The settlers in the Harrodsburg neighborhood held a convention in June and sent Colonel George Rogers Clark and Captain John Gabriel Jones as delegates to the Virginia Convention with a petition to that body to make Kentucky a county of Virginia. This project was bitterly opposed by Henderson; but upon the adoption by Congress, in July, of the Declaration of Independence, there was small chance left for the recognition of any proprietary government. When the new Virginia legislature met in the autumn, the petition of the “inhabitants of Kentuckie” was granted, and a county government organized. David Robinson was appointed county lieutenant, John Bowman colonel, Anthony Bledsoe and George Rogers Clark majors, and Daniel Boone, James Harrod, John Todd, and Benjamin Logan captains.

It was not until July that the Kentuckians fully realized the existence of an Indian war. During that month several hunters, surveyors, and travelers were killed in various parts of the district. The situation promised so badly that Colonel William Russell, of the Holston Valley, commandant of the southwestern Virginia militia, advised the immediate abandonment of Kentucky. Such advice fell upon unheeding ears in the case of men like Boone and his companions, although many of the less valorous were quick to retire beyond the mountains.

On Sunday, the seventeenth of July, an incident occurred at Boonesborough which created wide-spread consternation. Jemima, the second daughter of Daniel Boone, aged fourteen years, together with two girl friends, Betsey and Fanny Calloway, sixteen and fourteen respectively, were paddling in a canoe upon the Kentucky. Losing control of their craft in the swift current, not over a quarter of a mile from the settlement, they were swept near the north bank, when five Shawnese braves, hiding in the bushes, waded out and captured them. The screams of the girls alarmed the settlers, who sallied forth in hot pursuit of the kidnappers.

The mounted men, under Colonel Calloway, father of two of the captives, pushed forward to Lower Blue Licks, hoping to cut off the Indians as they crossed the Licking River on their way to the Shawnese towns in Ohio, whither it was correctly supposed they were fleeing. Boone headed the footmen, who followed closely on the trail of the fugitives, which had been carefully marked by the girls, who, with the self-possession of true borderers, furtively scattered broken twigs and scraps of clothing as they were hurried along through the forest by their grim captors. After a two days’ chase, Boone’s party caught up with the unsuspecting savages some thirty-five miles from Boonesborough, and by dint of a skilful dash recaptured the young women, unharmed. Two of the Shawnese were killed and the others fled into the woods. Calloway’s horsemen met no foe.