Boone: A Biography (43 page)

Among those who would join Boone in the long trek back to Kentucky in the late summer of 1779 were many sympathetic to the Tory cause. Most just wanted to get away from the conflict and violence and go ahead with their lives on the frontier. Some were related to the Bryans, or were friends of the Bryans. According to William Clinkenbeard, interviewed by John Dabney Shane in the 1840s, so many Tories were running away from North Carolina a traveler “
could hardly get along the road for them
,” and most of those who went to
Kentucky at this time were Tories. Clinkenbeard was probably exaggerating, but many
Tories did believe their chances of survival were
better in the West where loyalties were, hopefully, less an issue.

The Virginia legislature had passed a law offering cheap land to any who would clear a few acres and build a cabin in Kentucky. “
The right of preemption to four hundred acres
of land was accorded to all who had settled in Kentucky before January 1, 1778. Those who had actually made improvements might claim an additional one thousand acres of adjoining land.” For new settlers the price was $2.25 for a hundred acres, up to four hundred acres. An additional thousand acres could be bought for $400. First a settler obtained a warrant for a certain number of acres, then made an entry for a particular piece of ground with the land office. Next, the property had to be surveyed, and the survey registered with the land office. Only then would the land office award a patent “
which according to the statute,
carried ‘absolute verity.’” The final step would be for the county surveyor to survey the entry with callings based on the celestial meridian rather than magnetic compass readings.

By 1779 many of the would-be settlers resented the earlier military warrants issued by the colonial governor, Dunmore. It seemed unfair that royal grants giving the finest land to officers would still be valid. But those who succeeded in settling on a tract of available land could claim
a “pauper warrant
,” issued on credit by the county court to settlers with no money. Most business in Kentucky at that time was conducted on credit, since there was little cash to be had.

Among those who agreed to take advantage of the bargain lands were a large number of Boone’s own relatives, his brothers and sisters and their spouses and children. As we know, the Boones tended to move together as a clan. Almost certainly they looked up to their famous kinsman as the leader of the extended family. Ted Franklin Belue writes, “
By September 1779 Daniel had little choice
: He had to return due to the insolvency of his Transylvania claims.” Since Boone’s mother, Sarah Morgan, had died in 1777, the terrible Year of the Three Sevens, and was buried in Joppa Cemetery in Mocksville, North Carolina, beside her husband, Squire Sr., and their son Israel, the most important of Boone’s ties with the Yadkin was gone.

Treasury warrant, 1775. In 1775 Kentucky was officially part of Fincastle County, Virginia. All land purchases and grants were in theory from the Crown. (Courtesy Kentucky Historial Society.)

Boone’s large party left the Yadkin in September 1779. More than a hundred started out in a spirit of exhilaration, and were joined by others at Moccasin Gap, including the family of Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the Great Emancipator. Many were poor people without mounts or packhorses. Some walked barefoot all the way to Kentucky, carrying children and their belongings on their backs. On the other hand, Billy Bryan had twenty-eight packhorses loaded down with his equipment and household goods. Boone had about six horses loaded with kettles and farming and blacksmith tools. He had been given two small cannon by Gen. Griffith Rutherford of the regional militia. One of the swivel guns was for the use of Boone at his new station,
and the other for William Bryan at Bryan’s Station. But the artillery pieces were so heavy the horses that carried them died, and after being dragged for miles behind another horse, the cannon were hidden on Yellow Creek, within six miles of Cumberland Gap, to be retrieved later.
As it turned out, they never were recovered
, though Boone was still concerned about them as late as 1817. Jemima, riding double across a flooded river with a small girl, was thrown into the water when the horse spooked. She and the girl were rescued and Jemima joked that the ducking was bad, “
but much less so than the capture by
the Indians.”

Apparently Boone himself reached Logan’s Station
by October 14, for he is recorded as being present at the Virginia Land Commission hearing there that day. He may have ridden ahead to take care of business about his own claims. Boone and his large party of new settlers reached Boonesborough in late October 1779 and found the fort had fallen into disrepair again. In the thirteen months Boone had been away the stockade and buildings had been left unattended.
One British traveler of the time
compared the smell of the settlement to the sewers of European cities. Almost everything seemed to have fallen into neglect. Boone’s importance as a leader is shown again and again by the chaos and negligence that reigned in his absences from Boonesborough. Other high-ranking officers were there while he was away, but none seems to have taken the trouble, or had the authority, to keep the place repaired and clean. Whatever his pretensions to leadership and authority, and his courage in war, Richard Callaway seemed to do little except look after his own interests. At the time Boone arrived, Callaway may have been away from Boonesborough, escorting prisoners, including Henry “Hair Buyer” Hamilton, to Williamsburg.

Boone stayed at Boonesborough only long enough to build a cabin six miles northwest of the fort, on land originally claimed for James Hickman in 1774, where he had cleared a cornfield before leaving Kentucky the year before. A number of family and friends followed him there and they called the new location Boone’s Station. Snow had already fallen and the winter of 1779–80 proved to be the worst anyone
could remember and was called the Hard Winter ever afterward. Working in a foot of snow, the settlers built a cluster of half-faces, cabins open on one side.

Meanwhile, the Virginia Land Commission that had arrived in Boonesborough awarded Boone fourteen hundred acres of land north of the Licking River, but his title to the nearby land on Boone Creek, where Boone’s Station was being built, would prove to be not so clear, contested as it was by two other claimants. The Bryan relatives moved farther north to Elkhorn Creek, to establish Bryan’s Station northeast of Lexington, on land that had already been surveyed by John Floyd for Col. William Preston in 1774. Later the Bryans would try to buy the land from Preston, only to find that he had already sold it to one Joseph Rogers.

On Christmas Day 1779 Boone led his family and fellow settlers to Boone’s Station. Snow was deep and getting deeper. On December 19 John Floyd had written to Col. William Preston, “
The day is so cold . . . and the ink
freezes every moment so that I can’t make the letters.” It was so cold men found it hard to load their rifles or to fire them once they were loaded. Cattle froze to death in the woods. Wild turkeys, weakened by the cold until they couldn’t move, smothered to death as their nose slits clogged with the ice of freezing breath. In the deep snow it was hard for animals and people to move through the woods. It was almost impossible to trap or to hunt. Daniel Trabue at Logan’s Station wrote, “
A number of people would be Taken sick
and did actuly Die for the want of solid food.”

Boone had brought a substantial supply of corn from North Carolina and he shared his hoard with his neighbors until it ran out. He also shared the game he killed in the frozen woods. It was the custom among white hunters, as among Indians, to divide their kills. No one who lived through that winter in the hastily built huts of Boone’s Station ever forgot it.

Luckily there were groves of sugar maples nearby, and as the sap began to rise from the roots in February the settlers ventured out into
the woods to tap the sugar trees. While the men hunted and began to clear cornfields, the women and children hurried to collect sap and boil it down into maple syrup and sugar. Starving buffalo came out of the woods to drink the sweet sap. “
They could hardly drive them off
they were so poor,” one of Boone’s relatives would later recall.

As spring came to Boone’s Station, the men built more substantial cabins and fortified them with a stockade. The trees were cleared away around the palisades. The lesson of two years before had been learned. They knew they could not assume they were safe from Indian attack.

Boone and Rebecca would stay in the cabin at Boone’s Station for about three years. Around 1783, when his claim to the land at Boone’s Station was contested in the complex suit called
Hickman v. Boofman
, they would move on to a new and larger cabin near Marble Creek, a few miles to the southwest of Boone Creek. It is not certain when they made the move. Even though he was popular, the recognized leader among a large extended family and many friends and acquaintances, it is clear that Boone preferred his privacy. When given the option, he moved off into the woods away from neighbors. It was this tendency that gave rise to the jokes and legends about how he moved on when someone settled within miles of his cabin. In the folklore, when other settlers arrive within hearing distance or even a day’s travel, the punch line was always the same: Boone says to Rebecca, “
Old woman, we must move
on; they’re crowding us.”

Most folklore and legends grow out of a grain of truth. Boone’s love of solitude in the woods and privacy in his dwelling was a well-known fact. But the reality of his life, especially in the period at Boone’s Station, was that Boone and Rebecca had five children still at home—Israel, in his twenties, Rebecca and Levina who were in their teens, and the younger boys Daniel Morgan and Jesse Bryan. Also with the family were six orphaned cousins of Rebecca’s. Susannah and her husband, Will Hays, and their children also lived with them. As many as nineteen people lived in the big log cabins Boone built at Boone’s Station and
then on Marble Creek. Many of Boone’s children and grandchildren, brothers and their families, lived nearby at Boone’s Station.

In this period Boone continued to hunt and trap and grow corn and livestock and perhaps tobacco, but his life took a major turn during this period also. He was now forty-five, a patriarch, one of the best-known men on the frontier. He was famous for hacking Boone’s Trace, for building Boonesborough, for rescuing Jemima and the Callaway girls, for living among the Shawnees and escaping, for directing the defense of Boonesborough. He very likely knew Kentucky better than any other white man, from the mountains to the Bluegrass, from the licks to the Falls of the Ohio. He knew the Green River valley and the Cumberland valley. He not only knew the land intimately but was famous for knowing it.

After the Virginia Land Commission opened its office at Boonesborough in the fall of 1779, Boone found himself in great demand by settlers, immigrants, speculators, to find land for them, to survey it, and to register the claims. Because of his fame and popularity, his recognized authority as a scout and hunter, he was drawn more and more into the whirlwind of the lucrative land business as agent and surveyor, and he also became a speculator himself.

Before and after he became a licensed surveyor, Boone worked as a land “jobber.” That is, he located vacant tracts for those who had bought treasury warrants or who planned to do so. Any person desiring land in Kentucky could purchase such a warrant from the land office, entitling them to a stated number of acres that had not been entered for another claimant. Some of those who purchased warrants did not even come to Kentucky, but hired at long distance a locator such as Boone or Simon Kenton or John Floyd to choose an available tract. And most who did come to Kentucky to find land needed a guide who was familiar with the tracts already surveyed.

The big problem was there were no accurate maps of the region at that time, so even the best surveyors like Floyd had trouble knowing exactly where the boundaries of someone else’s claim might be. Add to
that the fact that many military warrants for veterans of the French and Indian War had been sold or traded, or in some cases never claimed, and the difficulty of locating available land was compounded. And even Floyd had undercalculated acreage of lands he surveyed by 10 or 15 percent.

To add to the confusion, the state of Virginia continued to sell land warrants long after all the best land had been claimed. Many of the later surveys done on treasury warrants were run over former claims. The latecomers hoped the original owners would forget about their claims, not pay their taxes, or decide Kentucky was too dangerous for settlement. Perhaps worst of all, Kentucky began to be overrun by “outlyers,” men who arrived in small groups and traveled around building cabins in the woods, hoping to claim they had made improvements. Their “cabins” were often little more than heaps of logs. Then before they had a certain title to the piece of land, they would sell the improvement. Neal O. Hammon writes, “
Some even sold the same tract
to several different people.”