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Daniel
Boone's Move to Kentucky
- by Theodore Roosevelt
The
American backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their
mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood
the continent beyond. The people threatened by them were dimly conscious
of the danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. Far off,
among their quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the
Rio Grande, the slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters
still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of
the growth of the power that was to overwhelm their children and
successors; but nearer by, Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algonquin
and Appalachian, were all uneasy as they began to feel the first
faint pressure of the American advance.
As yet
they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like
an unrent mantle. All through the mountains, and far beyond, it
stretched without a break; but toward the mouth of the Kentucky
and Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves
of woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies
of long grass. This region, one of the fairest in the world, was
the debatable ground between the northern and the southern Indians.
Neither dared dwell therein, but both used it as their hunting-grounds;
and it was traversed from end to end by the well-marked war traces
which they followed when they invaded each other's territory. The
whites, on trying to break through the barrier which hemmed them
in from the western lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing
along the line of least resistance; and so their first great advance
was made in this debatable land, where the uncertainly defined hunting-grounds
of the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon those of Northern
Algonquin and Wyandot.
Unknown
and unnamed hunters and Indian traders had from time to time pushed
some little way into the wilderness; and they had been followed
by others of whom we do indeed know the names, but little more.
One explorer had found and named the Cumberland River and mountains,
and the great pass called Cumberland Gap. Others had gone far beyond
the utmost limits this man had reached, and had hunted in the great
bend of the Cumberland and in the woodland region of Kentucky, famed
among the Indians for the abundance of the game. But their accounts
excited no more than a passing interest; they came and went without
comment, as lonely stragglers had come and gone for nearly a century.
The backwoods civilization crept slowly westward without being influenced
in its movements by their explorations.
Finally,
however, among these hunters one arose whose wanderings were to
bear fruit; who was destined to lead through the wilderness the
first body of settlers that ever established a community in the
Far West, completely cut off from the seaboard colonies. This was
Daniel Boone. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, but when only
a boy had been brought with the rest of his family to the banks
of the Yadkin in North Carolina. Here he grew up, and as soon as
he came of age he married, built a log hut, and made a clearing,
whereon to farm like the rest of his backwoods neighbors. They all
tilled their own clearings, guiding the plow among the charred stumps
left when the trees were chopped down and the land burned over,
and they were all, as a matter of course, hunters. With Boone hunting
and exploration were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness,
with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really
cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's,
and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life
made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any
kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the
end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often
portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who
never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer
any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance,
and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved
adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love
of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his
own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly
fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond.
Boone
hunted on the western waters at an early date. In the valley of
Boone's Creek, a tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech-tree
still standing, on which can be faintly traced an inscription setting
forth that "D. Boone cilled a bar on (this) tree in the year
1760." On the expeditions of which this is the earliest record
he was partly hunting on his own account, and partly exploring on
behalf of another, Richard Henderson. Henderson was a prominent
citizen of North Carolina, a speculative man of great ambition and
energy. He stood high in the colony, was extravagant and fond of
display, and his fortune being jeopardized he hoped to more than
retrieve it by going into speculations in western lands on an unheard-of
scale; for he intended to try to establish on his own account a
great proprietary colony beyond the mountains. He had great confidence
in Boone; and it was his backing which enabled the latter to turn
his discoveries to such good account.
Boone's
claim to distinction rests not so much on his wide wanderings in
unknown lands, for in this respect he did little more than was done
by a hundred other backwoods hunters of his generation, but on the
fact that he was able to turn his daring woodcraft to the advantage
of his fellows. As he himself said, he was an instrument "ordained
of God to settle the wilderness." He inspired confidence in
all who met him, so that the men of means and influence were willing
to trust adventurous enterprises to his care; and his success as
an explorer, his skill as a hunter, and his prowess as an Indian
fighter, enabled him to bring these enterprises to a successful
conclusion, and in some degree to control the wild spirits associated
with him.
Boone's
expeditions into the edges of the wilderness whetted his appetite
for the unknown. He had heard of great hunting-grounds in the far
interior from a stray hunter and Indian trader, who had himself
seen them, and on May 1, 1769, he left his home on the Yadkin "to
wander through the wilderness of America in quest of the country
of Kentucky." He was accompanied by five other men, including
his informant, and struck out toward the northwest, through the
tangled mass of rugged mountains and gloomy forests. During five
weeks of severe toil the little band journeyed through vast solitudes,
whose utter loneliness can with difficulty be understood by those
who have not themselves dwelt and hunted in primeval mountain forests.
Then, early in June, the adventurers broke through the interminable
wastes of dim woodland, and stood on the threshold of the beautiful
blue-grass region of Kentucky; a land of running waters, of groves
and glades, of prairies, cane-brakes, and stretches of lofty forests.
It was teeming with game. The shaggy-maned herds of unwieldly buffalo--the
bison as they should be called--had beaten out broad roads through
the forest, and had furrowed the prairies with trails along which
they had traveled for countless generations. The round-horned elk,
with spreading, massive antlers, the lordliest of the deer tribe
throughout the world, abounded, and like the buffalo traveled in
bands not only through the woods but also across the reaches of
waving grass land. The deer were extraordinarily numerous, and so
were bears, while wolves and panthers were plentiful. Wherever there
was a salt spring the country was fairly thronged with wild beasts
of many kinds. For six months Boone and his companions enjoyed such
hunting as had hardly fallen to men of their race since the Germans
came out of the Hercynian forest.
In December,
however, they were attacked by Indians. Boone and a companion were
captured; and when they escaped they found their camp broken up,
and the rest of the party scattered and gone home. About this time
they were joined by Squire Boone, the brother of the great hunter,
and himself a woodsman of but little less skill, together with another
adventurer; the two had traveled through the immense wilderness,
partly to explore it and partly with the hope of finding the original
adventurers, which they finally succeeded in doing more by good
luck than design. Soon afterward Boone's companion in his first
short captivity was again surprized by the Indians, and this time
was slain--the first of the thousands of human beings with whose
life-blood Kentucky was bought. The attack was entirely unprovoked.
The Indians had wantonly shed the first blood. The land belonged
to no one tribe, but was hunted over by all, each feeling jealous
of every other intruder; they attacked the whites, not because the
whites had wronged them, but because their invariable policy was
to kill any strangers on any grounds over which they themselves
ever hunted, no matter what man had the best right thereto. The
Kentucky hunters were promptly taught that in this no-man's land,
teeming with game and lacking even a solitary human habitation,
every Indian must be regarded as a foe.
The man
who had accompanied Squire Boone was terrified by the presence of
the Indians, and now returned to the settlements. The two brothers
remained alone on their hunting-grounds throughout the winter, living
in a little cabin. About the first of May Squire set off alone to
the settlements to procure horses and ammunition. For three months
Daniel Boone remained absolutely alone in the wilderness, without
salt, sugar, or flour, and without the companionship of so much
as a horse or a dog. But the solitude-loving hunter, dauntless and
self-reliant, enjoyed to the full his wild, lonely life; he passed
his days hunting and exploring, wandering hither and thither over
the country, while at night he lay off in the canebrakes or thickets,
without a fire, so as not to attract the Indians. Of the latter
he saw many signs, and they sometimes came to his camp, but his
sleepless wariness enabled him to avoid capture.
Late
in July his brother returned, and met him according to appointment
at the old camp. Other hunters also no came into the Kentucky wilderness,
and Boone joined a small party of them for a short time. Such a
party of hunters is always glad to have anything wherewith to break
the irksome monotony of the long evenings passed round the camp
fire; and a book or a greasy pack of cards was as welcome in a camp
of Kentucky riflemen in 1770 as it is to a party of Rocky Mountain
hunters in 1888. Boone has recorded in his own quaint phraseology
an incident of his life during this summer, which shows how eagerly
such a little band of frontiersmen read a book, and how real its
characters became to their minds. He was encamped with five other
men on Red River, and they had with them for their "amusement
the history of Samuel Gulliver's travels, wherein he gave an account
of his young master, Glumdelick, careing [sic] him on a market day
for a show to a town called Lulbegrud." In the party who, amid
such strange surroundings, read and listened to Dean Swift's writings
was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he came into camp
with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnese village he had found
on a creek running into the river; and he announced to the circle
of grim wilderness veterans that "he had been that day to Lulbegrud,
and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital." To this day
the creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is
known as Lulbegrud Creek.
Soon
after this encounter the increasing danger from the Indians drove
Boone back to the valley of the Cumberland River, and in the spring
of 1771 he returned to his home on the Yadkin.
A couple
of years before Boone went to Kentucky, Steiner, or Stoner, and
Harrod, two hunters from Pittsburgh, who had passed through the
Illinois, came down to hunt in the bend of the Cumberland, where
Nashville now stands; they found vast numbers of buffalo, and killed
a great many, especially around the licks, where the huge clumsy
beasts had fairly destroyed most of the forest, treading down the
young trees and bushes till the ground was left bare or covered
with a rich growth of clover. The bottoms and the hollows between
the hills were thickset with cane. Sycamore grew in the low ground,
and toward the Mississippi were to be found the persimmon and cottonwood.
Sometimes the forest was open and composed of huge trees; elsewhere
it was of thicker, smaller growth. Everywhere game abounded, and
it was nowhere very wary.
Other
hunters of whom we know even the names of only a few, had been through
many parts of the wilderness before Boone, and earlier still Frenchmen
had built forts and smelting furnaces on the Cumberland, the Tennessee,
and the head tributaries of the Kentucky. Boone is interesting as
a leader and explorer; but he is still more interesting as a type.
The west was neither discovered, won, nor settled by any single
man. No keen-eyed statesman planned the movement, nor was it carried
out by any great military leader; it was the work of a whole people,
of whom each man was impelled mainly by sheer love of adventure;
it was the outcome of the ceaseless strivings of all the dauntless,
restless backwoods folk to win homes for their descendants and to
each penetrate deeper than his neighbors into the remote forest
hunting-grounds where the perilous pleasures of the chase and of
war could be best enjoyed. We owe the conquest of the west to all
the backwoodsmen, not to any solitary individual among them; where
all alike were strong and daring there was no chance for any single
man to rise to unquestioned preeminence.
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