Boone: A Biography (26 page)

And Boone was a man of his era also. He was, at times, susceptible to the dream of power and wealth in the West, the unlimited opportunity, the clean slate, the beckoning future beyond the mountains, the destiny that seemed just within grasp, over the next ridge, same as other men. In Boone’s time it was understood to be a man’s duty to clear land and open roads, to let the light of civilization and churches into the threatening wilderness. A real man dammed water and led streams to turn gristmills and power the bellows of a blacksmith’s shop, built schools, and cleared away the briars and drained swamps, killed off the wolves and panthers and rattlesnakes. Boone was, in part, a man like other men of his time. He felt the call to do what was expected of him. He could build a cabin in a day or two with nothing
but an axe. He could clear land and build a fort. He could find a road and blaze the trees and clear them away, and he could inspire others to do the same. If he was not able to reconcile the two sides of himself, to think through the contradictions and conflicts implicit in his acts and ambitions, Boone was not alone.

In fairness it must be pointed out that with over two thousand miles of wilderness extending west from North Carolina to the Pacific, it may not have occurred to Boone or anyone else in 1775 that those regions could ever be so quickly settled and tamed. To Boone and his contemporaries, the wilderness must have seemed infinite, and infinitely challenging. It would be a few years before he saw how fast the forests could be chopped down and the game destroyed. No one could have believed in 1775 that the wilderness would vanish within their lifetime.

“
T
HIS IS THE
Marked difference
between Boone and the other Pioneers. He went out to possess; too many of them went forth to slay and destroy,” his biographer W. H. Bogart wrote in 1854. In February 1775 Boone returned from his mission among the Cherokees to his family on the Clinch River. For eighteen months they had been staying in David Gass’s cabin. Rebecca and the children began preparing for the second migration to Kentucky. The attempt in 1773 had not been well planned or directed. The journey of 1775 would be much larger, better organized and funded. The way would be opened and a fort built on the Kentucky River.
A location near the mouth of Otter Creek
had been agreed upon with Henderson and his partners. And since the land would have been bought from the Cherokees, the settlers would be safe.

Many historians, biographers, and writers have attempted to recreate the scene at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga in March of 1775. It is one of the pivotal and archetypal images in frontier history. As many as fifteen hundred Cherokees had assembled and camped there for the negotiations, signing, and celebration. “
James Robertson, also a
witness, kept a day by day account, and estimated that there were 1200 Indians at the treaty.” No doubt both sides thought they were getting a bargain, perhaps swindling the other. At the very least each assumed they had done well in the negotiations. It’s likely that a Cherokee as wise as Attakullakulla understood Kentucky was going to be overrun by white settlers in any case and his people might as well get what they could while the getting was good. Another sucker like Henderson was not likely to show up. Attakullakulla was a diplomat, renowned for pleasing all who could be pleased. And since the transfer of Kentucky lands had already been agreed upon that winter, the whole affair at Sycamore Shoals was more a ceremonial display than an actual negotiation.

The war chief Oconostota was not so sanguine as Attakullakulla about the proceedings, and the younger chief, Attakullakulla’s son Dragging Canoe, was angered by the transaction. But a consensus had been reached and there was no going back. Among the families camped along the river there was a good deal of excitement, expectation. No one was sure just how much of the loot any individual would get. The meeting grounds at Sycamore Shoals were near cabins and a fort already built by settlers who had leased some of the Cherokee hunting grounds. These new neighbors of the Watauga Association witnessed and enjoyed the proceedings and celebrations also, at the place the Cherokees called “the broken waters.”

At a meeting in North Carolina the previous winter Henderson and his partners had agreed to change their name from the Louisa Company to the Transylvania Company, reminding all that the new colony was beyond the long-standing barrier of the mountains.

In
The Wilderness Road
Robert Kincaid writes, “
Colonel Henderson opened the negotiations
by inquiring if the Kentucky land which he sought was actually owned by the Cherokee—a needless formality to give a guise of legality to the affair. The chiefs withdrew for a solemn powwow among themselves. Next day they reported their conclusions. Without question they owned the land, they said. The claims of the
Six Nations [the Iroquois] were spurious because they never conquered the Cherokee. The Shawnee had long ago been driven out of the country.”

With so many Cherokees gathered at Sycamore Shoals for the signing, it was a major effort for the Transylvania Company to feed all who had congregated day after day in growing numbers. The Cherokees called Richard Henderson “Carolina Dick.” A number of interpreters were involved in the bargaining, as well as Attakullakulla, his son Dragging Canoe, Oconostota, and the chief called the Raven. The actual deed of sale gives the amount of payment as “
for and in consideration of the sum
of two thousand pounds of lawful money of Great Britain,” but there are reports of as much as ten thousand pounds’ worth of merchandise given in the bargain also. The goods offered in exchange for land were spread out in tents for the Cherokees to inspect.

Later some Cherokees would claim all the goods were shoddy, cheap blankets, cheap guns.
It was reported that no liquor
was permitted at the treaty signing. And the chiefs who concluded the agreement would later defend themselves by saying that the young there were tempted by the goods, whatever they were worth, and were so greedy to own them there was no stopping the sale. There was a great deal of disagreement among the Cherokees about the whole affair. Dragging Canoe in particular opposed the transaction but was overruled by the majority.

Richard Henderson was shrewd enough to know that once all the people had gathered and seen the merchandise he had brought, it was too late for any chief to stop the transaction. It would be too great an anticlimax to return to their villages and leave the guns and blankets and money.

Though the discussions among the chiefs and negotiations between Carolina Dick and the Cherokees were lengthy and serious, the element of farce in the proceedings was understood at the time by many, both buyers and sellers. Some Cherokees reminded Henderson that their nation had never claimed land beyond the Cumberland River. Henderson and his partners knew they were acting against orders from the colonial
governments of North Carolina and Virginia and that the document authorizing them to negotiate with Indians was a sham. For all the heated talk and grand rhetoric, we have to suspect that individuals on both sides were grinning up their sleeves, congratulating themselves on pulling off a coup.

But Dragging Canoe was not grinning. He could not forget that this act was hastening and sanctioning the destruction of the huge hunting grounds of Kentucky, and the rush of settlers across Cherokee lands. Whatever the legal authority and promises of the agreement, there was no denying that the treaty would accelerate the settlement of land in the mountains and across the mountains. The next year Dragging Canoe would help organize an Indian confederation to vanquish the white settlements west of the mountains.
On March 17, 1775, the deed of sale was inked
, and Henderson bought the additional land between the Holston River and Cumberland Gap as a “path deed” to reach the lands he had already purchased.

Before Boone had left to begin chopping the road through the wilderness, the great chief Attakullakulla took him aside and said, “
[W]e have given you a fine land
, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.” The legend grew that Dragging Canoe had called Kentucky “dark and bloody ground” at that time, but there is no evidence that he did so. However, he did warn that “
there was a dark cloud over that Country
” of Kentucky. Even so, all who witnessed the proceedings at Sycamore Shoals remembered the eloquence and authority of Attakullakulla. Though tiny in stature, he was a man of great poise and wisdom, and a master of English. Pleasant Henderson, another of Richard’s brothers, later declared that the Little Carpenter was “
the most fluent, graceful
and eloquent orator he had ever heard.”

Several days before the actual signing and subsequent celebrations, Boone had left for the fort at the Long Island of the Holston, where the road crew assembled. His pay for organizing the signing party at Sycamore Shoals and leading the road makers was to be two thousand acres of land in Henderson’s new domain. The pay for those who
helped to chop the pathway to Kentucky was to be about ten pounds for around a month of hard and dangerous work. But a greater inducement was the prospect of being among the first to reach a new colony and claim choice parcels of land for themselves. And added to that was the excitement of being one of Boone’s advance party, just a few weeks of chopping away from the promised land of Kentucky.

Michael Stoner signed on, as did William Bush and David Gass. Also there was William Hays, a twenty-year-old Irish immigrant,
trained as a weaver
, and well educated enough to have helped Boone the autumn before write up his reports and accounts as a captain of the militia. “
Hays taught my father to write
with an improved hand,” Nathan told Draper. Hays was hard drinking and short tempered, but he became Boone’s close friend and was already courting his lively oldest daughter, Susannah. Suzy Boone wasn’t yet fifteen, but she had a reputation for being flirtatious, perhaps a little fast. Susannah was the subject of a good bit of gossip that followed her for the rest of her life and beyond. At least one informant later claimed she was “
a notorious prostitute
,” while others merely said she was lively and high spirited. The early Boone scholar John Dabney Shane was told Boone had warned Hays that if he married Susannah she might prove unfaithful. After they were married in 1775 Hays came to his father-in-law to complain. “
Trot father, trot mother
, how can you expect a pacing colt?” Boone is supposed to have said. After her wedding Susannah accompanied her husband and Boone’s crew on their road-building journey. The first month of her marriage would be spent cooking and keeping camp for almost thirty rough backwoodsmen. “
Mrs. Susan Hays—Boone’s daughter
, was a pretty good looking woman, medium sized—rather slim.” Josiah Collins would later report to John Dabney Shane that he had heard rumors about Susan but never knew her as other than well behaved. “
Susan when I saw her
at Bnsbgh. Was a clever, pretty, well behaved woman. These were stories that were in circulation and not anything I saw.”

In addition to William Bush, David Gass, Michael Stoner, and
William Hays, Boone’s crew included his brother Squire, Benjamin Cutbirth, Samuel Tate, and William Twitty from Rutherford County, south of the Yadkin in North Carolina. Altogether the party included twenty-six people. One of the crew was Felix Walker, who would later describe Boone as “
our pilot and conductor
through the wilderness to the promised land.” In his long career, Boone was often compared to Moses, and there was at least one parallel that his contemporaries could not have been aware of. Unlike the biblical patriarch, Boone actually reached the promised land of Canaan, but like Moses he was ultimately unable to possess and enjoy it.

To help Susannah Boone Hays feed and serve the company, a slave woman owned by Richard Callaway was sent along. Callaway had been hired to haul the tons of trade goods for the Cherokees to Sycamore Shoals. He now joined the crew of road builders. He was twelve years older than Boone, a colonel in the Virginia militia, from an affluent family, and he would figure significantly in Boone’s life over the next few years. It has been said he resented having to serve under a man younger than himself who had been a mere captain in Lord Dunmore’s War.

There has been a great deal of confusion over the years about what Boone’s Trace actually was. The name is so well known, so familiar to all, it is often assumed to be a real road, a kind of highway cut and graded through the mountains. But with no equipment for digging and excavation, the company with Boone was prepared only to clear away trees and brush, logs and rocks, for riders and packhorses to pass through the woods. It would be years before wagons could be brought through Cumberland Gap, more than two decades. At the time, it was not called the Wilderness Road, but Boone’s Trace or the Road to the Old Settlements. The term
Wilderness Road
seems to have come into use later, about 1796.

The crew’s job was to make the trace clear and passable to those who would follow them. They chopped trees and saplings, brush and limbs, briars and vines, out of the way. They likely moved rocks and
logs horses might stumble on, and found shallow places in streams for easy fording. They took the path around bogs and sinkholes near the creeks, and cut a way through canebrakes and curtains of grapevines. Since it was March, the woods were open and buds just beginning to break out. Felix Walker later said Boone conducted his men through the wilderness “
with great propriety, intrepidity
and courage.” Because they had only a month to cover more than a hundred miles, the crew had to work steady and fast. It was brutal, back-breaking work. Swinging an axe fifteen minutes will tire a modern man. Swinging an axe all day leaves muscles stiff and numb. After holding an axe for hours of chopping, fingers are so stiff they hurt when they let go of the handle. The scholar Arthur K. Moore tells us, “
Handiness with the axe
was one criterion of fitness in the wilderness, and men accordingly acquired extraordinary skill in management of the tool. Their precision is evidenced by the notched logs of cabins surviving from the period . . . steel conquered the West.”