Boone: A Biography (59 page)

On May 2, 1800, Daniel Morgan
married Sara Lewis, daughter of a neighbor, in St. Charles. Daniel Morgan was thirty years old, but Sara was only fourteen, though already statuesque and mature, described by those who remembered her as “Amazonian.” The newlyweds lived in the other end of the double cabin.

Boone had crossed many rivers in his long life, and he had paddled on the Kentucky and piloted a keelboat up and down the Ohio. But the Missouri River was something new. When he and his party first crossed to the north bank several miles west of St. Louis, they likely saw the Big Muddy at a period of low water. Unlike the Kentucky River, which ran in a deep limestone canyon throughout much of its course, the Missouri was a new river that swung restlessly between alluvial bottomlands, changing its course, eating away fields, altering its channels. The bluffs along the Missouri were often a mile back from the stream itself.

Early explorers had named it the Big Muddy because of its heavy burden of silt. The French explorer Marquette, who had first recorded the Algonquian Fox tribe name “Missouri” in 1673, noted how the brown waters of the Missouri did not readily mix with the gray water from the Mississippi for about a hundred miles downstream. The Indians told Marquette the river was named Pekitanoui, meaning “muddy water.” But Europeans named the river after the Indian tribe who lived on its banks, the Missouris, “people of the canoes.”
Where the rivers joined, the Missouri
crashed into the Mississippi with such violence spray shot into the air and the Mississippi ran rougher. In
Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain describes the mouth of the “savage” Missouri: “a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.” At 2,565 miles from the snowcapped Rockies in Montana to its mouth at the Mississippi 17 miles north of St. Louis, the Missouri was the longest river in North America, draining an area of 589,000 square miles. Its major tributaries were the Yellowstone and the Platte, and it could be navigated, with difficulty, all the way to the Great Falls in Montana.

Because the headwater streams in the high plains and Rockies froze in winter, the Missouri shrank drastically from December through March. In cold spells it froze as far south as St. Charles. When the ice broke in spring, the river was especially dangerous because of stampeding, crushing ice floes. At low water it was almost impossible to keep a boat from running aground on sandbars or hitting snags. In flood the raging current was too powerful to pole or row against. The poet T. S. Eliot, who was born in St. Louis in 1888, referred to the river in the poem “The Dry Salvages” as a “
strong brown god—sullen, untamed, and intractable
.”

W
HAT BOONE
saw when he crossed the Missouri that October was a river so muddy it looked at times fecal, sometimes bloody. The wild Missouri must have thrilled Boone as it had thrilled Indians and explorers
and would thrill Lewis and Clark, and the mountain men, and immigrants coming after them. However dark and menacing its currents, the river’s waters had been snow on brilliant peaks, dripped from spruce trees, had been touched by western Indians and grizzly bears.

There was never any doubt that the Missouri was a man’s river, brawny, brawling. French boatmen who had plied its waters for years trading whiskey, blankets, rifles for furs with the Indians along its banks, bragged that they drank the water of the river, cherishing the minerals in its silt. If newcomers sprinkled cornmeal in a cup of river water to precipitate out the mud, they were said to be losing the “pith” of the water. “
It is a thoroughly masculine river
, a burly, husky, bulldozer of a stream, which has taken on the biggest job of moving dirt in North America,” Stanley Vestal wrote in his history of the Missouri.

The river Boone found in Missouri, the one he would settle beside, paddle on, trap on, voyage on to the hunting grounds upstream, was crooked and ornery every mile of its length, and the channels and currents within each mile were crooked also. Even so there is every reason to believe that Boone fell in love with the Missouri. The river was as untamed as the west he sought. The Missouri was no river for birch bark canoes. Only a wooden dugout could resist the snags and gravel bars. One way to navigate the Big Muddy was to lash two dugouts together with a kind of platform in between for carrying furs or supplies.

East of the river stretched woodlands and tall-grass prairie, with enough rainfall for corn and vegetable crops. West of the Missouri the high plains and short-grass prairie began, fit only for wheat and small grain, and farther upstream the Rocky Mountains rose out of the plains without warning. East of the river Woodland Indians eased through the forests on foot, but west of the river the Plains Indians rode horses as if they were centaurs and followed the herds of buffalo. Missouri was not only the place where western waters mingled with waters from the east, but it was also the territory where Indian and white immigrants from the east encroached on land claimed by
Osages and other western Indians.
It was the place where North met South
, and English speakers met Spanish and French. Missouri would become the battle line, the site where conflicting visions of America’s future would collide and contend far into the nineteenth century.

From the time he was a boy, Boone had yearned for the West. He had followed the stars to the Cherokee country and the Tennessee country, and he had gone farther into the Shawnee country of Kentucky and Ohio. But in Missouri he was about to touch the true West, the far West. The waters of the Missouri passed through Osage Indian country, Kansa country, Crow and Cheyenne, Sioux and Arikara, Blackfeet country. At the age of sixty-five Boone must have felt he had reached a new and dramatic threshold.

It would be said that mules in Missouri got their cussedness from drinking water from the Big Muddy, the most cussed of all rivers. And some of that stubbornness rubbed off on the people too. Boone would discover that boatmen coming down the river might sing beautifully at times, but they also liked to yell at each other, and at those they passed on the banks, not just greetings but ribald jokes, insults, obscenities, challenges, brags, all in the spirit of frontier humor, camaraderie. The profanity would have reminded Boone of the gifted Aaron Reynolds of Bryan’s Station, and the insults hurled over the stockade walls at the siege of Boonesborough. It would remind him of the roughness and relish of the old days, when he was young and the threat in Kentucky was from Indians, not lawyers.

With the glowing phrases and welcome of Delassus and Trudeau ringing in his ears and plumping up his vanity, after the defeats and humiliations in Kentucky, Boone accepted the honors and lived on Daniel Morgan’s already cleared property on Femme Osage Creek, about thirty miles up the Missouri, not bothering to clear even an acre of the arpents granted in his name. He would never bother to follow through with registering his own grant or getting the governor’s guarantee in writing that he would not have to clear land or plant crops on his claims. It was the old story. Paperwork was a bother, a nuisance. A
deed could always be written out by some menial clerk and registered later. In the meantime there was new land to explore, a river to paddle on, a wilderness filled with buffalo and beaver and Osage Indians. It was like old times.

Because he was to be the honored “syndic,” Boone was assured by the Spanish governor that he could do, or not do, virtually whatever he chose. Delassus promised Boone that if a substantial number of additional immigrants could be attracted to Missouri, Boone’s personal grant would be expanded tenfold. It was all so easy and thrilling, and Boone did not get the necessary documents to guarantee the promise. According to some accounts he needed to get official deeds registered in the capital in New Orleans, and he never bothered with that either. When Louisiana was bought by the United States four years later, Boone did not have one properly registered deed to show to the new American land commission charged with verifying and transferring claims. And he still had not cleared up an acre of land or built a cabin of his own on the land. A “cabin” could be little more than a pile of sticks, but Boone did not even make that token effort.

Boone hunted and trapped in the nearby woods and along the great river, familiarizing himself with the new country. Besides beaver, the river and creeks had otter, mink, muskrat. Foxes and wolves roamed the hills. The lowlands did not have as many bears as the mountains of Kentucky, but there were deer aplenty. As he had done in North Carolina and his first years in Kentucky, Boone depended on his hunting and trapping for his income. Hides and furs could be taken to market in St. Louis, where they brought higher prices than they had in the backwoods of North Carolina and Kentucky. Nathan told Draper: “
In the latter part of the summer of 1801
or 1802, my father joined us on a deer hunt for a while. He then visited a hunting camp of the Shawnee and met Jimmy Rogers and Jackson whose Indian name was ‘Fish.’ They along with an old squaw, were survivors of his old acquaintances when a prisoner in 1778.” This was the same Joseph Jackson who had been taken prisoner at the Blue Licks in 1778. He had chosen to spend
much of the rest of his life with the Shawnees. Jackson would later be interviewed by Lyman Draper in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in April 1844 shortly before his death.

B
OONE’S FIRST
encounters with the Osage Indians were much like his initial contacts with Cherokees and Shawnees. Out hunting with Nathan and Daniel Morgan, he met a party of forty or fifty Osages. As was his habit, Boone smiled and shook hands and said “Howdy.” One of the warriors admired Daniel Morgan’s fine rifle and offered to trade his own cheap gun for the excellent Kentucky weapon.
The Osages called a gun a
wa-ho-ton-the
, “thing that causes things to cry out,” and most of their weapons were muskets procured from the French. Daniel Morgan was furious and refused, but Boone persuaded him to relent.
Later Boone pointed out that they were lucky
to lose only the fine rifle, not their furs or even their scalps.

By the second winter in Missouri, even though he had collected many pelts and deer hides for trading, Boone was already in debt to the merchant in St. Louis who provided his supplies. The old woodsman seemed constitutionally unable to stay out of debt.

In succeeding years, even as he assumed the role of syndic, he roamed farther afield in his hunting. His arthritis must have abated, for he took to poling or paddling far upriver to the tributaries of the Missouri such as the Grand and Osage and Gasconade. His companion on these trips was sometimes Nathan or Daniel Morgan, but often it was Daniel Morgan’s slave named Derry Coburn. Derry had a family of his own, and he was an enthusiastic woodsman. He and Boone hunted together for years and became close friends.

According to Nathan Boone, “
[Derry Coburn] was a good Negro
. He would relate with much gusto stories about his two hunting trips with Father, especially the difficulties they had with the Indians, always giving himself the precedent in the narrative.” One neighbor later recalled that from the time he was about twenty-two, Derry Coburn had accompanied Boone on hunting and trapping expeditions.

It was said that Boone and Coburn became so accustomed to each other’s company, familiar with the other’s habits, that they could hunt all day without saying a word. In the woods it is better to keep quiet, to attract no notice from animals or Indians, and the two understood each other without speaking. Many times during his long career Boone’s hunting companions were African Americans. The scout who first led him across the Blue Ridge was the herdsman Burrell. It was Pompey who interpreted for him and guided him in the ways of the Shawnees at Chillicothe, enabling him to survive and eventually escape. There is a rumor it was Monk Estill who had taught him how to make gunpowder when nothing was more precious or essential in the Kentucky settlements. But it is important that we not forget that Derry Coburn was a slave and that Boone was the father of Derry’s white owner. However congenial the two men were, the reality was that Derry was not a fellow hunter but a servant who cooked and cleaned up around the camp, dressed the game, and carried the supplies and baggage. We should guard against the tradition of sentimentalizing such relationships.

Boone and Derry Coburn went on longer and longer hunts and journeys of exploration. They paddled up the Grand River and later reached the Rocky Mountains, going as far as the Yellowstone with a larger hunting party. Boone was very much aware of the wilderness to the west, the great plains and higher mountains, and though he was seventy years old, he wanted to go there and apparently did. Hunters later reported encountering Boone at the Great Salt Lake, but that claim is less certain. What is certain is that he would have traveled there had he been able. The West was in his thoughts. In a few short years the Rockies and the Great Basin, the High Sierras and the Cascades, would be swarming with hunters and trappers and explorers called mountain men, such as Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith, Hugh Glass and the Bent brothers, trapping beaver and killing grizzlies on an astronomical scale. These men would model themselves after Boone and follow in his footsteps, going ever farther west. If he had
been younger he would have gone there himself. But unlike Boone, the mountain men did not take their families into the wilderness, did not, for the most part, have his charisma or rapport with the Indians, and would not have a Filson to make their stories classics.

Derry Coburn lived until 1851, and Nathan talked to Lyman Draper about him. Among the stories told about Boone and Coburn was one of a hunt around 1803 when, after spotting Indian sign, the two men lay low for many days, not daring to fire their rifles. Finally, when he thought it safe, Boone shot a deer and “hoppused” it into camp. Just as they were cooking the venison and it was ready to devour, a party of Osages appeared firing guns in the air and yelling. They took all Boone’s and Coburn’s furs. Even worse, they took the venison, just as the two starved men were ready to relish it. Losing a fortune in furs was one thing. Losing tender venison when you are hungry was another. “
He never was so mad in his life
,” Derry later said of Boone.