Boone: A Biography (22 page)

Though often neglected by historians,
the Watauga experiment set a precedent
with far-reaching significance. It was a model for other independent communities such as Transylvania, Cumberland, and the State of Franklin.

Records show Boone buying goods from a trader in the Holston Valley, about thirty miles away, at this time. In the 1771–72 winter he hunted in what would later become the state of Tennessee. In the fall of 1772 Daniel returned to Kentucky with a group of hunters, including his old friends Samuel Tate and Benjamin Cutbirth, and a hot-tempered young man from the Yadkin named Hugh McGary, destined to figure in Boone’s life more than once as the years passed. They hunted near Hickman Creek and Boone’s Knob. In the next century an inscription was found on a cave wall nearby, “
D.B. 1773
.” Below Boone’s initials was Hugh McGary’s name. The two hunters also left their names carved on a tree
in the Green River country
.

While this group was hunting, the fever for land speculation in Kentucky was growing in the colonies to the east. There are reports
from this period of revival preachers promising from the pulpit that “
heaven is a Kentucky of a place
.” Surveyors for many companies and speculators were already crawling through the thickets and driving stakes, planting flags, and blazing trees all over the region. It was understood that a fortune and a future were to be made by anyone who could nail down a claim there. Pretending to be hunting, the surveyors hid their compasses, which Indians called land stealers. Among the exploring parties was one that included James Harrod of Pennsylvania.
According to some accounts
, Boone met Harrod in Kentucky in 1773 and agreed to join him later in establishing a settlement at the Big Spring on the Salt River.

The eyes of the world had turned to the paradise that Boone had seemed to have virtually to himself three years before. It was time for anyone who hoped to make a move and stake a claim to do so. Kentucky was nominally Fincastle County, Virginia, and the governor of Virginia planned to allow veterans of the French and Indian War to stake out claims in the region. Besides Harrod, the McAfee brothers, Robert and James, were locating and marking their own claims.
Capt. Thomas Bullitt surveyed tracts
around the Falls of the Ohio in 1773, and the next year Col. William Preston, surveyor of Fincastle County, sent his own surveying party under John Floyd to resurvey and claim the region around the Falls again. It was about this time that Richard Henderson, whose term as a judge was coming to an end, began to formally set in motion his scheme, which he had been pondering for years, to buy Kentucky.

He knew the colonial governments of North Carolina and Virginia, following the Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbade the private purchase and settlement of land west of the mountains. Henderson had to be especially careful to conceal his scheme, because he feared on the one hand the anger of citizens who resented his status and wealth, and on the other the wrath of the colonial governors, who had forbidden civilian purchases of western land. He also had to prevent competitors, as
well as Indians, from knowing his plans. George Washington had instructed his own agent in the Ohio Valley to survey land there “
under the guize of hunting game
.”

Boone’s first attempt to settle in Kentucky was a joint venture, not with Henderson but with a man named William Russell, an important trader, landowner, and captain of militia, who had already settled in the extreme southwestern corner of Virginia, on the Clinch River. Boone appears to have been hired on as a scout and guide. Russell held military warrants primarily intended for use on land east of the mountains. But he hoped the government of Virginia would recognize claims he might make in Kentucky also. Boone was only one of several Long Hunters who served as guides and partners to the land speculators. While the Long Hunters were mostly interested in hunting and exploration in Kentucky, some would return there to claim land and build settlements, and several, including Boone, served as scouts and advisers to the larger entrepreneurs and land speculators. The hunters were essential to the surveyors and developers because they were familiar with the unclaimed and barely charted region.

If Boone had already been in the employ of Richard Henderson and the Hart brothers, he was now shifting his services to another entrepreneur and leader of the frontier. Whatever his plans had been earlier, Henderson was not free just yet to immigrate to Kentucky because his judgeship in North Carolina did not officially expire until 1774 or 1775.

William Russell was a man of substantial wealth, with ties to the tidewater gentry of Virginia. Educated at the College of William and Mary, he had served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and impressed the royal governor, Lord Dunmore. His second wife was the sister of Patrick Henry. Russell was restless and ambitious, and he had moved to the frontier in the 1760s, ahead of most of the settlements. His fortune had grown and would become greater still. In the meantime, Boone’s family had gone back to the upper Yadkin, where his eighth child, Jesse Bryan, was born May 23, 1773. His oldest child, James, was
now sixteen, a strapping youth on whom much of the farmwork fell. We don’t know why Rebecca, who had refused to go to Florida in 1765, was willing to relocate to the wilderness of Kentucky. The embarrassment of debts and the possible loss of their land to creditors might have been factors. But Daniel’s accounts of the glories of Kentucky may have affected Rebecca also. It would be a mistake to think that only men were drawn to the opportunities and romance of the frontier. “
The wives of our western pioneers
are as courageous, and as ready to enter on the line of march to plant the germ of a new settlement, as their husbands,” wrote John Mason Peck, who had interviewed many such wives. Squire Boone and his wife, Jane, and their children joined the party also, as did Benjamin Cutbirth and his wife, Elizabeth, Boone’s niece, and other neighbors and hunting buddies.

A warrant issued for Boone’s arrest in Virginia two years later suggests that he, or someone working with him, William Cowan, bought supplies for this expedition at Draper’s Meadows and had not paid. It is possible Boone was named because he was the leader of the group going to Kentucky. “
We command you that you take
Danl. Boone and Wm Cowan if they be found within your Bailiwick, and them safely keep.” William Cowan later returned and paid the bill.

There were many farewells between family and friends who were leaving the Yadkin and those who were staying. Daniel’s mother, Sarah Morgan, and a few others accompanied the emigrants for half a day before saying their final farewells. Sarah was now in her seventies, and both mother and son knew it was likely the last time they would ever see each other. It was she who had taught him tolerance and patience, a delight in the world around him, a reverence for all life. Her gift for calm acceptance was an essential part of his nature. He had inherited her tendency toward attention and joy. It has been said that both Daniel and his mother wept freely as they parted. This was one of the several occasions Daniel is reported to have wept. For all his reputation as a stoic, he was apparently not a man to hold back his tears. On February 15, 1773, Rev. George Soelle recorded in his diary a meeting
with Sarah Morgan Boone. “I visited William Briant, and the old, sick, Mother Buhn. She is a Quaker by birth, but very eager for grace and the forgiveness of her sins. She was very glad that I came to her, and it was given to me to tell her of the grace through the blood of Jesus for all poor longing souls, to which she listened with many tears.”

By the middle of August the party from the Yadkin had reached Russell’s settlement at Castle Wood on the Clinch River. There they packed all their belongings in hickory baskets to be strapped on either side of packhorses, much like what were called panniers in England, for there was no road for wagons and carts into Kentucky. Babies as well as chickens and little pigs were carried in the baskets tied to wooden pack saddles. While some of the women and children would ride at least some of the time, men and boys drove the hogs and cattle and led the horses.

It was a large party that set out, the first attempt of whites to settle in Kentucky. White men had camped there and hunted there and fought and died there, but without women there would be no settlement, no land cleared and crops put in, no children born. The Russells had several slaves who went along, and there were a number of young adventurers such as William Bush and Michael Stoner, who would be close friends with Boone. Stoner, whose original name was Holsteiner, was born in Pennsylvania of German parents in 1748 and left his apprenticeship with a saddle maker to be a woodsman in the western lands. He would become one of Boone’s favorite hunting companions, and he was already known as an expert marksman. “
Stoner was an awkward Dutchman
, a low chunky man,” Nathan Boone told Draper. “He became a good woodsman, as he was truthful and reliable.” In almost every case, frontiersmen were remembered and honored more for character and dependability than for marksmanship or scouting ability, Boone included. In the dangerous world of the West, integrity counted above all else.

The colonial governments of Virginia and North Carolina had warned settlers not to cross the mountains into Cherokee and Shawnee hunting lands. At the Treaty of Hard Labor, South Carolina, in
1768, the British government had conceded to the Cherokees the rights to the southern region of Kentucky. At the Treaty of Fort Stanwix the same year the Iroquois had agreed to give up their claim to the Great Meadow north of the Kentucky River in return for substantial payments and assurances that their homelands in upstate New York would be safe from English settlement. It was, however, all a muddle, and whatever the policies of North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania might be, they were unable to enforce them. The frontier was too wide and the gathering tide of speculators and settlers too powerful to be stopped. Lord Dunmore viewed those settling on the frontier with skepticism and despair. “
Americans . . . do and will remove
as their avidity and restlessness incite them,” he wrote. “They acquire no attachment to Place: But wandering about seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is a weakness incident to it, that they should forever imagine the lands Further off, are Still better than those upon which they are already Settled.”

And great men with official ties to the colonial governments, such as George Washington, William Russell, Patrick Henry, Richard Henderson, and a hundred others, and indeed the colonial governors themselves, could not resist the opportunities that Kentucky promised. In fact, Lord Dunmore had sent his own surveyors into the wilderness but found it wise to distance himself from their activities.
Dunmore denied that he had sent
Bullitt and other surveyors west of the Donelson Line (the agreed-upon limit of white settlement), but at the same time he gave official patents for much of the land that had been surveyed. One of the lawyers advising Dunmore was Patrick Henry,
who had his own plans for
buying land from the Cherokees. The colonial governments could no more stop the gathering rush into Kentucky than they could have curbed a flood with a sieve. It was a story that would be repeated again and again, until the great valleys of California and Oregon were settled, and the farthest plains of North Dakota.

Moving livestock and a pack train of horses through the wilderness on a scarcely visible trail was very slow work. Most livestock in
the wilderness had bells on their necks, and
Nathan Boone said that bells
were put on horses to prevent them from getting lost. The party labored over Horton’s Summit and Powell’s Mountain, going about a hundred miles in two weeks. Because their progress was so slow, Boone saw they would need extra provisions, and he sent his son James back to Castle Wood, with John and Richard Mendinall, for additional supplies. William Russell, who had remained behind to finish his business and then follow with a second party, gathered the extra goods and horses and cattle and sent a guide named Crabtree and a hired man named Drake as well as his oldest son, Henry Russell, and two slaves named Adam and Charles to help the boys carry the supplies and drive livestock over the mountains.

On the night of October 9, 1773, James Boone, Henry Russell, and the rest of the party camped along the trail near where Wallen’s Creek runs into Powell’s River. They did not realize they were only three miles behind the main party. As the boys sat around the campfire, wolves began howling, and Crabtree laughed to see how startled his young companions were when he
told them they would hear wolves
howling in the treetops in Kentucky.

As they slept, a group of fifteen Delawares and two Shawnees and at least three Cherokees watched from the woods. The Indians had been to a gathering of tribes to discuss the threat to their hunting ground from white settlers. No doubt the Indians were angered by the news of a large incursion into their territories. At about dawn they fired into the sleeping group, killing the Mendinall boys immediately. They were the lucky ones. Crabtree and the hired man named Drake were wounded but fled into the forest. James Boone and Henry Russell were shot in the hips and couldn’t run. The slave named Adam hid in some brush and witnessed what followed.

While the slave named Charles was frozen with fear, the Indians plundered the supplies and gathered the horses. But one or two of the braves began to slash at the wounded and crippled boys with their knives. A fever of anger and cruelty seemed to build in the Indians as
James and Henry tried to fend off the blades with their hands. Maybe it was the sight of blood on their mangled hands that incited the braves to greater cruelty. James recognized one of the torturing Indians as a Shawnee named Big Jim, whom he had met before. In fact,
Big Jim had been befriended by
the Boone family, Nathan Boone later told Lyman Draper. James pleaded with Big Jim to spare him, but the Shawnee’s response was to begin pulling out James’s fingernails.