Boone: A Biography (17 page)

Leaving this last outpost of white civilization, Boone and his companions moved down the river until they could see the cliffs called the White Rocks, set like teeth in the mountain rim. Boone would later describe to Filson the sense of dread and horror that chain of mountains and cliffs could evoke, appearing to be an insurmountable barrier. And then Boone and his party saw the gap, opening a way into the west. Sharp as a gunsight cut into the mountains, this defile was the place where hundreds of hunters and explorers would line up their sights on Kentucky and the West, and hundreds of thousands of settlers would follow over the next half century. Cumberland Gap became the most famous pass in America, a gateway to the future. Many had passed through the gap before. Gabriel Arthur had crossed there in 1674, escaping from captivity, but it was Boone who made it famous and drew so many to its threshold.

As the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously put it, “
Stand at Cumberland Gap
and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the farmer—and the frontier has passed by.” The Indian name for the gap, Ouasioto, would be forgotten, and the name of the Duke of Cumberland, Butcher of
Culloden, would stick to the gap and mountain range, river and plateau. History and geography are a tissue of such ironies and paradoxes.

Beyond the gap the Warrior’s Path swung to the north. Boone and his companions entered Pine Mountain Gap, a water gap and the final gateway into Kentucky, crossed the Cumberland River near Flat Lick, then the Laurel River, Rockcastle River, beyond Hazel Patch, then stepped through the low Sand Gap, or Boone’s Gap, into the watershed of the Louisa or Kentucky River. Here the mountains began to peter out into sharp hills known as the Knob Country. A few miles down the river, in a meadow where the town of Irvine would later be, they pitched their Station Camp. Boone climbed nearby Pilot Knob, and from there he could look into the far distance and the land of rolling forests, meadows, and canebrakes along the river. If Boone had wondered before whether Kentucky was only a fable, he could now see the place was a splendid fact.

Many historians have referred to Boone’s Pisgah vision from Pilot Knob. Pisgah was the mountain described in Deuteronomy 34:1, which Moses climbed after wandering in the wilderness, to look over into the Promised Land. A number of painters have portrayed Boone gazing from a height into the new land of Canaan. Like Moses looking over into the Land of Canaan after so many years of wandering in the wilderness, Boone gazes on the goal of his quest, the Great Meadow. But as Draper points out, there was “
this important difference
, that the Lord’s prohibition of Moses ever going thither did not . . . apply in Boone’s case.” And so this image of Boone’s first sighting the blue-grass of central Kentucky became an icon of American history and myth. But what Boone viewed was already colored and enhanced by the expectations he carried with him. In Arthur K. Moore’s words, “
What Daniel Boone saw from Pilot Knob
in June, 1769, was not only a magnificent forest enveloped in a blue haze but also a fabled garden interpenetrated with myth.” Boone and others brought the idea of Kentucky with them, and what they actually found sometimes surpassed their expectations.

While Stewart and the others continued to build shelters at Station Camp, Boone and Findley began to explore the country to the north. They followed the Warrior’s Path to Findley’s old camp on the stream that would be named Lulbegrud Creek, a tributary of the Red River, and found the remains of his stay there. “
On the seventh day of June following
, we found ourselves on Red-River, where John Finley [
sic
] had formerly been trading with the Indians, and, from the top of an eminence, saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucke.” It was the sight of Findley’s former camp that proved conclusively that Boone and his party had reached Kanta-ke. Boone and Findley had found the site that the Shawnees had called Blue Lick Town, but the Shawnees were gone and their huts burned. Much of Boone’s history, and Kentucky’s, would be connected to a place farther north on the Licking River called the Lower Blue Licks.

There was another blue that caught the explorers’ attention, the grass that covered so much of the meadowlands of the region, called ever after the bluegrass. Bluegrass would come to be understood as almost synonymous with central Kentucky and Kentucky culture. There has been a good deal of discussion about what is actually meant by the term
bluegrass
. Some have suggested the bluegrass is of European origin and brought by early traders in the hay they packed their trade goods in. Scattered in their camps, the seeds swept over Kentucky, filling an ecological gap, and became a prominent feature of the region. Most botanists agree that bluegrass is
Poa pretensis
, which seems to have originated in Pennsylvania, though it could have been brought there from Europe in the seventeenth century.
Some say bluegrass came from England
where it was called smooth meadow grass. What seems certain is that the grasslands of Kentucky were covered with this and similar grasses by the time Boone and Findley were gazing on the rolling hills and gentle valleys in 1769. Though we have no proof, it seems likely that such extensive growth had taken much longer than seventeen years, perhaps centuries, to spread so thoroughly. The region’s limestone soil, on which the grass thrives, lies on the formation
geologists call the Cincinnati Arch, said to be the oldest soil in North America.
According to the historian George W. Ranck
, the term
bluegrass
is an abbreviation of “blue limestone grass.”

Christopher Gist had noted
the “blue grass” in that region in 1751. The name and the image of bluegrass had entered the language, and the folklore and imagination of the country, by 1745, and they have stayed vivid to this day. Whatever its origins, the sweeping savannas of lush, shining grass were a sight to behold. It is a wonderful paradox of our language that bluegrass music refers to music of the mountains, the backcountry, whereas the bluegrass region is the aristocratic, racehorse-breeding area of central Kentucky.

Some historians have suggested that fires set by Shawnees and Iroquois in hunting to drive game were the source of the open meadows and savannas of the Bluegrass region. Certainly
the Iroquois had cleared the region
in more senses than one. A later historian and archaeologist, Nancy O’Malley, would describe the region: “
The realized niche
of the Inner Bluegrass was an uncommonly rich one, being well wooded but with occasional openings that were amenable to clearing. Its soils were generally rich and deep; and its rolling topography was more erosion resistant than many other areas. Other environmental realities included a sometimes uncertain surface-flowing water supply ameliorated by the presence of numerous permanent springs.”
Recently ecologists studying the records
have decided that the central region of Kentucky had more forests than meadows, though some of the more fertile areas had curiously open woodland or “savannah” with large canebrakes (
Arundinaria gigantea
) on uplands, and stretches of grassland that might be called prairie.
The botanist Short in 1828
said that large sections of central Kentucky were covered with orchards of pawpaws.

There has been little disagreement about the fertility of the ground in this section of Kentucky. Every early traveler noted the richness of the limestone soil.
Some said there were no leaves
under the trees because the ground was so rich the fallen leaves rotted before winter
was over.
George Croghan, a trader who
had seen Kentucky more than once, would report in 1765 that the land was too rich for growing anything but hemp, flax, and Indian corn.

That June, Boone and his companions began an idyll in the wilderness. Game was so plentiful that buffalo and elk, deer and turkeys, practically stationed themselves in front of a rifle sight. Boone and Stewart and Findley hunted while the others stayed in camp and prepared the hides. To be worth a “buck,” a buckskin had to be shaved and the rough outer skin scraped away. According to Draper, “
[T]he skin was thoroughly rubbed across
a staking-board until rendered quite soft and pliant, thus stripping it of all unnecessary weight and fitting it for packing more compactly.”

Boone also took the opportunity to go farther afield in his explorations. It was during this summer and fall that Boone began to learn Kentucky. It is likely no other white man ever knew the whole of the pristine Great Meadow so intimately and completely. At this time he ranged as far west as the Falls of the Ohio, where Fort Nelson and then Louisville would later be built. He hunted north of the Blue Licks to the Ohio and followed the river, which the French explorer La Salle had called
la belle rivière
, down to the cane lands near the mouth of the Kentucky River. He found dozens of salt springs and licks, and the oil springs. He found a thousand bold springs where water issued blinking into the light from under the roots of a tulip poplar or dogwood. Boone found the mouths of caves in the limestone where cool air breathed out in summer and cooler air was pulled inside in winter. He saw ebbing and flowing springs that gushed and then slowed to a trickle as the catchment inside the rock filled and then was siphoned empty again. “
He was on a mission
,” William Gilmore Simms wrote of Boone in 1845. “The spiritual sense was strong in him. He felt the union between his inner [self] and the nature of the visible world and yearned for their intimate communion. His thoughts and feelings were those of a great discoverer.”

This first exploration of Kentucky caused writers of the nineteenth
century such as C. W. Webber to dip their pens into purple ink. “
Here the mother that he had worshiped
had put on her beautiful garments at last, and revealed herself to him as God had caused her to be. Here he would realize the joy of worship, the soft terror of an overcoming awe, and transported, cry aloud in wonder.” In 1852 Webber described Boone’s exuberance on this first hunt into Kentucky. “
[Boone] only felt yearnings
—ungovernably strong—the meaning of which he could not know—but which led him deeper and deeper with yet more restless strength into the cool profounds of the all-nourishing bosom of his primeval mother.” Even in the Victorian age, the gender and sexual overtones of Boone’s passion for Kentucky were implicitly understood.

As far as we know, Boone did not have a compass with him. He depended on the sun by day and the stars at night to keep his orientation. And of course he could look at moss on the north sides of trees, except in deep woods and hollows where moss grew on all sides of the trunks. Navigation in the wilderness, especially when exploring, is less a matter of quadrant directions than of following land features such as mountain ranges and river systems. Knowing where the watershed of the Rockcastle River ended and that of the Kentucky River began was more important than knowing true north or the degree of latitude. In a deep forest where it was hard to even see the sky, it would be difficult to know which direction to pursue to reach a gap or river gorge. There the best method of finding your way was to choose the tallest tree in sight and climb it. A hunter, careful not to leave his rifle on the ground, laid it on limbs out of the reach of the ground. Once in the top he could part the limbs and look far out over the tops of the other trees to a river sparkling in the distance or a peak he recognized rearing to the left.

Though honeybees had not reached the Kentucky wilderness in 1769, and the most common milk in the region was buffalo milk, the place was in a metaphorical sense a land flowing with milk and honey. The buffalo fed on clover and wild peavines and shoots of young cane, and bears on grubs and acorns and a dozen kinds of berries. Fox grapes
ripened on the creek banks after the first frost. Though Boone and his companions were primarily collecting deer hides, they also killed elk and buffalo from time to time.
Elk hides were cut up
to use as harness and straps, and bear and buffalo skins were used for bedding. It was an extended frolic, every day presenting new vistas, a wonderful summer that stretched into fall and a wonderful Indian summer. Among the wonders was the fact that it was an Indian summer in which they saw no Indians, although called that because it was the season when Indians were most likely to be on the warpath.

For convenience and safety, Boone and his party had made several smaller camps in a large semicircle around their base at Station Camp. That way the hides and furs were cached at different locations. If Indians attacked one camp and took the furs, they might miss the others, and the men could slip away into the forest. However, the bulk of their equipment and supplies, as well as hides and furs, was kept at the Station Camp, hub of their operations.

On December 22, a bright, beautiful day, Boone and Stewart were roaming the woods with their rifles, relishing the bounty around them, when a party of Shawnees appeared out of a canebrake and took the hunters prisoner. In Filson’s account of 1784 Boone says, “
In the decline of the day
, near Kentucke river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners. The time of our sorrow was now arrived, and the scene fully opened. The Indians plundered us of what we had.” Surprised and outnumbered, Boone and Stewart had no choice but to surrender. The Shawnees, returning from a hunt on the Green River to their villages north of the Ohio, probably as surprised by the encounter as Boone and Stewart, ordered the hunters to show them their camp.

Boone tended to display a remarkably cool head in emergencies. As the Shawnees threatened him with their tomahawks, he cheerfully agreed to show them one of the outlying camps. As they approached the camp, Boone took care to make enough noise so that his companions working there would be warned. The men who were in the camp
got the warning and slipped away unnoticed by the Shawnees. Boone calculated that the men who had fled would warn the others and that they would
quickly hide the accumulated pelts
and hides, and the valuable supplies at the base camp, in the woods. To give them time he led the Shawnees to each of the outlying camps one by one. All guns and powder and lead, traps and precious salt, were confiscated along the way. When he finally had no choice but to lead his captors to the main camp, Boone was astonished to find that the other men had simply fled into the woods, leaving the great hoard of furs and hides, supplies and horses, in plain sight. His stalling for time had been wasted.