Boone: A Biography (21 page)

1772–1774

The four years from 1771 to 1775 were frustrating for Boone. His overwhelming desire was to settle in Kentucky and bring his family and friends there. His dream was to hunt in Kentucky and live in peace with the Indians on this “Bluegrass island.” Almost everything he did was aimed at this overriding goal. But between his desire and its fulfillment lay hundreds of miles of dangerous mountains, the opposition of the governors of North Carolina and Virginia, the land grabbing of large entrepreneurs and political leaders, lack of funds, and outbreaks of fighting between Indians and whites on the frontier. The early 1770s was a time of roadblocks, hurdles, detours, digressions, and disturbances caused by the Regulators in North Carolina. Every step turned into a misstep. It must have seemed at times he would never be able to settle in the land he felt had been promised to him. When Daniel reached his farm on the Yadkin after twenty-four months away, robbed of his furs and even his rifle, he was poorer than when he had started out on May 1, 1769. Some of his debts had been paid by Squire the year before, but more had been incurred for supplies for the second winter in the wilderness, and by his family while he was away. With accumulating interest, the debts had grown and were still growing.

According to Archibald Henderson, “
The reports of his extended
explorations, which he made to Judge Henderson, were soon communicated to the other partners of the land company; and their letters bristle with glowing and minute descriptions of the country as detailed by their agent.” Though the Louisa Company was not formally organized until three years later, subsequent testimony makes it clear Henderson and the others were already thinking of purchasing Kentucky lands from the Cherokees, perhaps as early as 1768. Boone’s report was crucial to their planning.
Boone’s description of the land
of Kentucky spurred much discussion and many letters between Henderson and his friends. However, Henderson was still a judge in the colonial court, appointed about the time Boone had left for Kentucky in 1769, and had much on his mind besides real estate in Kentucky, including Regulators and the accelerating acts of defiance and rebellion.

Though his two years in Kentucky were a failure in any accountant’s ledger, they could be seen as a triumph when measured in other ways. Though he returned empty-handed, he had found the Bluegrass island. He had
seen
Kentucky and traveled it from one end to the other, and he had survived. He had found the defile to the west and stood on a high peak in the Knob Country. He had seen more deer and bears and buffalo than he could describe, and he had seen the wonders of the caves, the salt licks, the mammoth bones, the sweeping savannas of bluegrass, clover, and cane, and followed the Kentucky River to the wide curving procession of the Ohio. He had found the Falls of the Ohio and the valley of the Green River and followed the Cumberland to the French Lick.

The most valuable thing he had accomplished he probably could not have put into words. At the cost of loneliness, and worry about his family far away over the mountains, he had evaded Indians and endured cold and wind, floods and summer heat, flies and snakes, wolves and capture. He had lost his close friend and brother-in-law, John Stewart. He had been robbed twice of everything. But his victory was something that had happened within him. He was a different man from the one
who had set out from the Yadkin in 1769. Alone in the wilderness, he had found something in himself beyond the thrill of hunting, beyond the vision of profit from commerce in hides and furs and ginseng.

Whatever the looks and muttering of his neighbors as he returned again empty-handed from his voyage, and whatever the unpleasant duns and demands from creditors, he felt richer as he resumed his life on the Yadkin. It was time for spring planting. Everyone who knew Boone knew he was in some important way
different
. Some did not approve of that difference, but they recognized it. His peculiar ability to rise above enormous setbacks and keep his thoughts on other things is one example of his difference. Some called it naïveté, others laziness, and still others accused him of indifference to his family. From their perspectives they may have been partly right. The thoughts that occupied Boone were not always intelligible to others. Most intelligent and practical people who had returned from two years in the wilderness broke would have settled down to business the way his friend Henry Miller had years earlier. But Boone was different.

As far as is known, Boone returned to the business of farming and local hunting in 1771. His daughter Rebecca had been born on May 26, 1768, and his son Daniel Morgan on December 23, 1769, almost eight months after he left for Kentucky. It is quite possible that was the birth that gave rise to the legend that one of the Boone children was illegitimate. His next child was Jesse, born in 1773. If Rebecca was angry at him for his long stay in Kentucky, no comment to that effect has come down to us in any of the interviews with descendants and relatives and friends. A Moravian missionary named George Soelle preached along the Yadkin in September 1771 and recorded in his diary meeting the wife of one “Nath. Buhn.” He says that “Mrs. Buhn” was the daughter of Joseph Bryant. This likely is Rebecca, and Reverend Soelle mistook “Daniel” for “Nathaniel.” “Mrs. Buhn” expressed great fears and uncertainty. “
She is by nature a quiet soul
, and of few words. She told me of her need, and that her heart was often restless and anxious, though then the feelings would again leave her, xxx She can not read. I heard
her gladly and told her of the loving heart of Jesus, open to her, and bade her turn to Him wherever she was by day or night. She seems less earnest in the matter than he, but has more feeling.” It is possible that Daniel had to “sleep on the couch” for a while as her resentment cooled and wore itself out, but there is no testimony to that effect. In any case, Daniel’s long absence gave her a rest from the almost continuous effort of childbearing.

A better story of Daniel’s reunion with Rebecca in 1771 was told to Draper by one John B. Roark. When he reached Beaver Creek on the upper Yadkin, Daniel found that his family had gone to a neighborhood frolic. Arriving at the dance, he realized he was so disheveled and his beard and hair so long no one recognized him. He went up to Rebecca and asked for a dance. When she drew back, he said, “You need not refuse me for you have danced many a time with me.” Rebecca recognized his voice, and tears filled her eyes as she hugged him. The neighbors were amazed to see her hug this old, unkempt hunter. Then they too recognized him and he entertained the company all evening with tales of his adventures in Kentucky.

W
HILE
D
ANIEL
had been away, the region around Beaver Creek had become far more populated than it had been when he left in 1769. Not only was the upper Yadkin becoming too thickly settled for Boone’s taste, but his creditors would not leave him alone. In March 1771 a complaint had been filed in court accusing him of hiding from the law and his obligations in the wilderness. A warrant for seizure of his property had been obtained. “
We therefore command you that you attach
the Estate of the said Daniel Boone (if to be found in your Bailiwick) or so much thereof replivable on Surety given as shall be of value sufficient to Satisfy the said Debt and Costs.”

It is not clear exactly when Boone moved his family across the mountains farther west. His youngest son, Nathan, not born until 1781, recalled hearing tales from his siblings of Cherokee Indians visiting their home, apparently near Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River, in what
would become far eastern Tennessee. Nathan told Draper the move was made in 1772 or 1773. Sycamore Shoals was a place that would later figure prominently in Boone’s life. It is a wide, beautiful valley where the river chops over rocks in a section the Cherokees called Watauga, or “the broken waters.”

The settlement of the Watauga Valley had begun around 1769, just as Boone was leaving for Kentucky. In 1772 the settlers, many of whom had fled North Carolina after the collapse of the Regulator Movement, would organize as the Watauga Association and lease their land from the Cherokees. Though sanctioned by neither the colonial government of North Carolina nor Virginia, they would become the first white community west of the North Carolina Blue Ridge. Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virgina, wrote at this time, “
[Watauga] sets a dangerous example
to people of America, of forming government distinct from and independent of his Majesty’s authority.”