Boone: A Biography (28 page)

Henderson’s relief was considerable. He embraced Cocke and promised him yet another five thousand acres for his solitary ride across the mountains. But it was Boone to whom he felt the greatest gratitude. “
It was owing to Boone’s confidence
in us, and the people’s in him, that a stand was ever attempted in order to wait for our coming,” Henderson wrote later in his account. However, he did not offer to give Boone any additional land, more than the two thousand acres he had promised at the beginning. Only his panic on the trail and his exhilaration at arriving at Boonesborough explain Henderson’s generous gifts to Cocke.

Henderson was a fascinating man, of considerable means, education, ambition, vision. An English friend wrote of Henderson, “
Even in the superior courts
where oratory and eloquence are as brilliant and powerful as in Westminster, he soon became distinguished and eminent, and his superior genius shone forth with great splendour, and universal applause.” While others might see Henderson as greedy, law-defying, a little mad, Boone viewed his employer as the good angel who had finally enabled him to settle in Kentucky. But Richard Henderson was a lawyer and businessman, dependent on men like Boone in the wilderness. In choosing Daniel Boone, in spite of his debts and credit history, Henderson proved an excellent judge of character. Without Boone, his venture would have been a disaster from the start. Its later collapse would be beyond both his and Boone’s control and would have nothing to do with anyone’s skill in the wilderness.

The story of Boonesborough is a wonderful combination of legend, heroism, failure, and farce. The site was originally dubbed Fort Boone by the road makers, in honor of their foreman, but Henderson wanted to give the capital of his colony a name to suggest civilization and stability, not war and danger, and he changed the name to Boonesborough. The first scattered cabins were in a hollow close to the river, but Henderson chose to place his stockade on the gently sloping meadow above the river. The hollow was filled with sycamores and contained the two springs, one fresh and bold, the other sluggish and salty. “
A spring at Boonsburrow constantly
emits sulphureous particles, and near the same place is a salt spring,” John Filson would write later. Animals had gathered to lick the salty ground there for thousands of years, and Indians had lived there also.
Historians have pointed out
that the site of Sycamore Hollow resembled in many ways the treaty signing grounds at Sycamore Shoals.

Henderson’s plan for a stockade included a large rectangle of log palisades, about 80 by 240 feet, with a two-story blockhouse at each corner. The second stories of the blockhouses would extend out over the palisades so defenders could shoot at those attempting to climb the
walls or set the logs on fire. There would be at least eight cabins inside the walls and a front gate facing away from the river. Henderson wrote in his diary on April 21, 1775, “
After some perplexity, resolved
to erect a fort on the opposite side of a large lick, near the river bank, which would place us at the distance of about three hundred yards from the other fort—the only commodious place near or where we could be of any service to Boone’s men, or vice versa.”

The fort Henderson designed
would have two gates, one in front and one in the back facing the river. There was to be about a half acre of open ground inside the fort. Boone was assigned to supervise the building of the stockade. It was clear Henderson recognized his own weakness and lack of authority in the wilderness. Boone knew how to talk to the men and he knew the woods and the manners of the woods. For much of the activity Boone was in charge. But building the stockade as planned proved more difficult than anyone expected, even for Boone. The men were not disciplined or trained as builders. They were a loose collection of hunters, adventurers, hangers-on. They wanted the best cheap land, and they wanted to claim and clear their own plots, not help in the heavy work of fort building. Instead of the cooperation expected, there was dissension. Even Henderson’s partner Nathaniel Hart moved out of the settlement to his own place up the river. There seemed little interest in building common defenses against Indian attacks. The cabins at Boonesborough remained separated, not enclosed in a picket wall of upright logs. Henderson’s quarters, which would form the blockhouse at one corner of the stockade, were built, but work on the fort was postponed.

In retrospect, it seems difficult to explain such lack of cooperation and sense of common purpose. It became clear to Henderson that many of his would-be settlers were rolling stones, debtors, loafers, men eager for adventure and disposed to avoid work. In a letter of June 12, 1775, Henderson wrote to a partner in North Carolina, “
To give you a small specimen
of the disposition of the people, it may be sufficient to assure you, that when we arrived at this place, we found Captain
Boone’s men as inattentive on the score of fear, (to all appearances) as if they had been in Hillsborough. A small fort [that] only wanted two or three days’ work to make it tolerably safe, was totally neglected on Mr. Cocke’s arrival, and unto this day remains unfinished, notwithstanding the repeated applications of Captain Boone, and every representation of danger from ourselves.” Henderson went on to explain that the men worked in their fields scattered for two miles along the river and didn’t even bother to take their guns with them. About thirty men out of the original eighty had returned to the settlements over the mountains. The men who stayed seemed desperate to clear their own fields and put in crops. Without a crop they would not be able to stay the next winter and they would lose their claim on the land. No doubt that necessity of clearing a patch and planting corn was part of the explanation for the reluctance to build the fort. And many of the men may have been exhausted from the heavy work of chopping their way through the mountains, clearing land, building cabins, plowing the root-laced soil.

In our times it’s hard to comprehend the settlers’ rage to clear land. While we now tend to see trees as friends and forests as welcoming shade, those on the frontier more often viewed trees as enemies and forests as a refuge for Indians, panthers, wolves. It was one’s duty to fell the threatening trees and tear away the brush and let the sunlight of calm and reason into the swamps and hollows. Land was there to be surveyed, brought under the axe and plow. With wilderness stretching west hundreds of miles to the Mississippi, and danger lurking in thickets and canebrakes, their only hope was to clear a space for cultivation and safety. It was the dream of settlers to have green pastures and orchards of apple and peach trees. The ground had to be divided in straight lines and the crops planted in straight lines, making sense of sprawling terrain. Sinkholes had to be filled in and springs deepened. The forest had to be driven back to acceptable boundaries. A settler went to war, not only with Indians and the British, but with briar and mighty oak tree.

And once the forest had been pushed back, the fight had only begun. On every foot of cleared space weeds sprang up like grass fire, higher than a man’s head. Brambles and vines ran rampant. Seedlings took root and sumacs shot up ten feet in two months. With scythe and axe the settler did battle all summer against the army of weeds that threatened to surround and drown him. The wild growth in the hot southern sun had to be corrected and instructed. But where a forest had been cleared up and sorted out, and farmed for four or five years, the topsoil washed away if the ground was slightly tilted. Gully-washing rains and frog-strangling storms swept away the black forest mold and left clay grooved and smocked as though by giant fingers. With all the topsoil gone, the dirt no longer fit or fertile, the land was called an old field, good only for school yard and churchyard, or graveyard. The settlers had no choice but to go farther into the woods to slay more trees and rip out roots and rocks and slice open the soil for the next new field.

To build a serious fort of the size Richard Henderson planned required enormous effort. The palisades of heavy logs had to be sawed or chopped, dragged out of the woods, and set in the ground. The fence alone, as Henderson had planned it, would require close to a thousand logs. Each log had to be cut and trimmed and pulled to the building site. By June the weather was getting hot, and there were flies and mosquitoes to worry about, as well as hornets and wasps.

To set the logs upright as pickets, a ditch had to be dug, sometimes three or even four feet deep. With only picks and shovels, the ditch was made through rocks, fat roots, packed clay. The bigger roots had to be sawed or chopped, and first exposed by shoveling enough to be reached by saw or axe. Once the big logs were set, large end down, the dirt was heaped around them and tamped firm. When the logs were pegged together, the wall was even stronger. It would be difficult to imagine harder labor in the summer heat. No wonder the men preferred to be working off in their own fields, or hunting.

And once the fence and gates of the enclosure were in place, the
work was only started. To function as a fortress the structure had to have those two-story blockhouses at each corner, the second story jutting out over the first and over the palisade. Without the raised blockhouses, those inside could not see out except through cracks between the logs. And ideally the fort would have a walkway behind the length of the wall where riflemen could stand or kneel and shoot at attackers. “
Henderson took up his quarters
in a block-house erected at this time. It formed an angle of defense—the angle nearest the river,” the historian George Ranck tells us. To withstand attacks of more than a few hours, the fort had to have a well and a storehouse for provisions. There had to be a powder magazine and tools for repairing guns and making bullets. There had to be fireplaces and pens for livestock. Any horses or cattle left outside, the Indians would steal or kill. One visitor to Boonesborough in 1775 wrote, “
It was all anarchy and confusion
, and you could not discover what person commanded, for in fact no person did command entirely.” Henderson thought only another attack could wake the men up to follow his commands and complete the defenses. The Boonesborough fort would remain unfinished until 1778.

From his diary and letters we can see that Henderson was an eloquent man but uncomfortable with the conditions of frontier living. He saw himself and his partners as the lords proprietor of a thriving colony growing ever richer and more powerful. He had brought with him a library of forty-eight expensive volumes. The reality of life in the wilderness appalled him. His immigrants included men who had left the settlements to escape authority and order, often to escape the law itself. While Henderson reported a world that seemed to be falling apart, Boone, who was used to frontier conditions and the men who went there, appeared to be satisfied with their progress.

One reason the settlers were so anxious to put in crops was that provisions were already running low. Most of what they had brought with them was gone and they had to live on what they could shoot until the crops came in. But game was soon scarce around the fort.
Therefore getting the new potatoes and squash, beans, and corn big enough to eat was crucial. Corn could be eaten when it first ripened, was “in the milk,” about eighty days after planting. By August 1 they might have roasting ears and gritted bread made from grated, semi-hardened kernels.

While working in the woods the men had to contend with many pests. Hornets and spiders, copperheads and sting worms, lurked in the brush. Nicholas Cresswell, an English traveler in the area that summer, wrote in his journal on May 26, 1775, “
Much tormented with Ticks
, a small animal like a Sheeplouse, but very tough skin. They get on you by walking in the Woods . . . and if you don’t take care to pick them off in time they work their heads through the skin and then you pull the body away but the head will remain in the skin, which is very disagreeable.”

While many plans seemed to be going awry, and Henderson and Company were under attack from almost every front, events occurred at Boonesborough between May 23 and May 27, 1775, that seem more the stuff of myth than of history. Yet the records are explicit and detailed. Henderson called a convention of representatives from the scattered and struggling settlements in Kentucky. It was his first effort to establish government and laws in the projected colony. James Harrod of Harrodsburg and Boiling Spring, and Benjamin Logan and the settlers of St. Asaph’s, were not pleased that the Transylvania Company claimed to own much of Kentucky and therefore held proprietary rights over their surveyed lands, but most saw the wisdom of gathering and organizing for a common purpose.

Henderson may not have been much of a frontiersman or construction boss, but he knew that he could buy off many who opposed him by cutting them in on a slice of his enterprise. At Martin’s Fort near Powell’s River he had bought off Joseph Martin by hiring him as entry taker for the company to keep a record of those migrating to Kentucky. And to bring Martin’s brother Bryce into the fold he had awarded
him a tract of land in the new colony. “
April 3, 1775, Mr. Bryce Martin enters
with me for 500 acres of land lying on the first creek after crossing Cumberland Gap northward from powels valey going toward Canetucky river. Richard Henderson.”

Those chosen to represent Boonesborough at the convention were Squire Boone and Daniel Boone, William Cocke, Samuel Henderson, William Moore, and Richard Callaway. From Harrodsburg came Thomas Slaughter, John Lythe, Valentine Harmon, and James Douglas. From the new station at Boiling Spring came James Harrod, Nathan Hammond, Isaac Hite, and Azariah Davis. And from St. Asaph’s, John Todd, Alexander Spotswood Dandridge, John Floyd, and Samuel Wood. Benjamin Logan, the leader at St. Asaph’s, who planned to resist Henderson’s claim to Kentucky land, did not attend. John Floyd, representing Col. William Preston, the official surveyor and leader of Fincastle County, Virginia, may have been there primarily to witness the proceedings, though he later proved willing to join Henderson’s enterprise. It was the first attempt at organized government by the English colonists west of the mountains, and the convention got off to an auspicious start on May 24. Since there was no meetinghouse, the delegates assembled under a huge elm tree behind Henderson’s camp, called the Divine Elm, later described by George W. Ranck as “
that magnificent tree, the sole cathedral
in a wilderness as vast and as solitary as the illimitable ocean.”
A platform had been built
at the foot of the great tree, on which the speakers stood, and delegates sat on logs, or on the ground, or leaned on their rifles while listening. The meeting began with a prayer and perhaps a few words of exhortation by the Reverend John Lythe, an Anglican priest from Harrodsburg,
possibly the only time a prayer
was said for the English king on Kentucky soil. Then Henderson opened the convention with words of eloquence, of which he was a master.