Boone: A Biography (8 page)

When Daniel and Henry returned to Virginia (named in the sixteenth century for Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen”) in late fall, they didn’t stay for long with the family at Linnville Creek but continued back, all the way they had come the previous spring, to Philadelphia, to sell their furs and deer hides. Years later a grandson of Henry Miller said that his grandfather and Boone, after a year of hunting and trapping, carried their furs to Philadelphia and sold them for thirteen hundred dollars and then went on “
a general jamboree or frolic
k” until the profits of their hunt were spent. Afterward Miller was disgusted with himself and vowed to never again waste the earnings of his effort. He told his descendants that “
Boone was very profligate
,” happy to blow whatever he made. It appears that from the
beginning Boone had little interest in accumulating wealth. Young Henry Miller settled down in Augusta County, Virginia, becoming a prosperous blacksmith. He and Daniel remained friends, however, and when Boone served in the Virginia legislature many years later he took his wife and young son Nathan with him on a visit to Miller’s considerable estate. The two kept in touch from time to time for the rest of their lives.

While the family stayed in Virginia and Daniel hauled his furs to Philadelphia, Squire Boone traveled on to North Carolina himself and put in a claim for a square mile of land, 640 acres, on Grants Creek, near the Yadkin. The cost was only three shillings, but the claimant had to pay a quitrent to the Earl of Granville, who owned much of the western section of the colony.
Records show that Squire served
as a chain man for a survey in Anson County on October 4, 1750. Through the quitrent system, charging an annual fee to settlers who had bought parcels of land, the proprietors and administrators of the colonies were able to continue something of the European feudal system in the New World. Settlers throughout the colonies would chafe under the burden of quitrents, and the system of perpetual payments would become an issue in the American Revolution, a quarter of a century in the future.

The Boones arrived on the Yadkin in the fall of 1751. The Yadkin and its feeder creeks moved fast enough to turn gristmills and saw mills. The bottomlands and meadows offered unsurpassed soil for farming, and the higher ground was ideal for grazing. Rumor has suggested that the family lived in a cave by the river, still known as one of many “Boone’s Caves,” that first winter. Whether they lived temporarily in a cave or not, it is certain that they soon built a cabin on their land. By 1753 it seems Squire Boone had bought more adjoining land. His holdings eventually became substantial enough for him to give generous sections to some of his married children. The extended family of Boones formed a whole settlement by themselves, and the value
of their property rose as other families streamed into the beautiful valley and surveyed and cleared acreage.

It is hard for modern readers to visualize the amount of labor necessary to settle a farm on the frontier in the eighteenth century. Once the first rough shelter was made on the claimed land, the work had hardly begun. Pens and huts for livestock had to be built of poles or pickets, split rails, and brush, and then the necessary kitchen garden cleared and fenced to keep out the deer, livestock, raccoons, and ranging hogs. Just to clear a garden patch required days of chopping and sawing, digging out stumps and grubbing up roots. Luckily the North Carolina Yadkin soil was not as rocky as the Pennsylvania fields.

The soil along the river and tributary creeks of the Yadkin Valley was a rainbow of colors and textures. Near the streams, the ground, once cleared of roots and exposed to the sun, was a black alluvial powder, a mixture of silt and sand and rotted vegetation perfect for growing watermelons and corn, crops favored by loose, damp soil. In a rainy season streams sometimes overflowed and left standing pools in the hot sun that scalded the roots of species such as beans.

Farther from the river, on gently rising land that rarely flooded, the topsoil was rich brown, the color of dark roast coffee. Stiffer than the loam along the river, the dirt was still loose when plowed, with glittering bits of quartz and mica among its crumbs and sugary lumps. Among the brown cortex of soil were patches of silver clay drawn up by the plow, and yellow splotches of oxide-rich subsoil exposed by cultivation or erosion, as well as beds and bands of red clay.

And farther back on hillsides the ground was mostly red clay, in shades ranging from light orange to terra-cotta to blood brightness and maroon. But the tilted ground washed quicker, grooved by runoff like gathered cloth. The upland fields washed out and had to be replaced in three or four years by cleared new ground. The higher land was better for pasture than for crops. Worn-out acres good for nothing else were used as sites for churches and schools, hence the term
old field
schools
. Higher ground out of reach of floods was chosen for the first graveyards.

John Lawson, who had explored the Carolina foothills in 1700, wrote about the region, “
The Land was very good and free
from Grubs and Underwood. A man near Sapona [the Yadkin] may more easily clear ten Acres of Ground than in some places he can one . . . That day we passed through a delicious Country (none that I ever saw exceeds it.) We saw fine bladed grass six feet high, along the Banks of these pleasant Rivulets.”

The greatest labor was clearing the fields for corn and other crops. The bottomlands along the Yadkin were covered with giant sycamores and tulip poplars, eight, ten, or sometimes fourteen feet in diameter. Wetter ground was called maple swamp, buried beneath huge maple trees and choking vines and standing pools in the rainy season. The only practical solution was to girdle the big trees, hacking rings around the trunks, cutting off the lifeblood of sap in the bark from root to branch tips. Such a deadened tree, sometimes called a belted tree, could not put out leaves to shade the soil beneath. After the first year the twigs and branches would begin to rot and fall in wind and storms. Over the following years the bigger limbs would fall and the deadened field would look like a harbor of weathered, crooked masts. Great shields of bark peeled off the trunks and dropped to the ground, making the field, when covered with rotting watermelons in exposed red clay, look like a Homeric battlefield.

But meanwhile the soil beneath the dead trees was being tilled with hoe and bull-tongue plow pulled by oxen, loosened by heavy grubbing hoes that chopped through roots. Corn could be grown in these rough acres where smaller grains such as rye and wheat could not. Corn grew faster in the powerful soil than the weeds around it, reaching up into the hot southern sun that came through the deadened canopy. Corn, which had been introduced to Europe, was native to this soil and had been grown here by Indians for thousands of years.

Corn was the essential, universal crop for the settlers on the Yadkin.
It could be eaten as roasting ears in the milk, when first ripe, or it could be gritted on a grater into bread when a little more mature. When hardened in the fall, corn could be ground into grits or meal and made into mush, pudding, or bread. Corn could be fed to horses, cattle, hogs. The sweet fodder was stripped from the lower stalks in late summer and kept as winter feed for the horses. The tops of the stalks were cut just above the ears and piled in stacks for winter feed for cattle. Corn-shuck-filled ticks were used for mattresses. Corncobs were used for starting fires in the morning, for tobacco pipes, and for a purpose later served by toilet paper.

Without a gristmill nearby, corn had to be crushed by a heavy wooden pestle on a hollowed stump, called a hominy block, as Indians did. But every settlement soon had at least one mill turned by a stream, where carved stones with grooves ground the grains into meal. Skilled masons cut the millstones, carving the grooves precisely with little picks. As millstones got worn, the grooves had to be sharpened again with the little picks.

Of course the favorite use for corn for many was to dampen the grains and let them sprout. The sprouted kernels were then ground up with sprouted barley to make malt. Mixed with water and sugar, the malt was allowed to ferment into a strong beer. When the beer mash was heated, the alcohol boiled off as steam and could be caught in a still and cooled as drops of whiskey. Boiled again, the whiskey was refined into doublings, or potent moonshine. Wherever the settlers went, they had mills and deadened fields and stills. And once they had apple trees they made cider and hard cider and applejack.

T
HE HARSH
conditions and hard work, and relative freedom from oversight by officials and gentry, encouraged a rough, reckless culture on the frontier. Travelers such as the Reverend Charles Woodmason were astonished by the behavior of both men and women in the region. Woodmason noted that the women “expose themselves often quite naked without ceremony—rubbing themselves and their hair with bears’
oil and tying it up behind in a bunch like the Indians—being hardly one degree removed from them.”
Woodmason was only one of many
who noticed how white and Indian cultures came to resemble each other in the backcountry.

By 1752 surveyors in the area were using Squire Boone’s land as a reference for their callings. And it seems that by the next year Squire had acquired even more acres of land. In the new location there were no Quaker meetinghouses for Sarah to attend with her children. Sometimes Squire organized nondenominational services, and he rose to be an important figure in the developing region, a magistrate and justice of the peace. The closest seat of government and commerce was Salisbury, about twenty miles away. Rowan County’s
Minutes, Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions
for 1755 to 1767 show that
Squire served on local juries
. Squire helped lay out the town of Salisbury and may have named a street Freemason Street in honor of his affiliation with the order, though there was no official lodge in Rowan County at that time.

F
ROM THE
time he was a boy, Daniel had hated the spirit-numbing work of farming. “
He never took any delight in farming
or stock raising,” Daniel’s nephew Daniel Bryan said many years later, “but followed hunting untill he grew to Manhood.” Like other farm boys, he longed for rainy days when the fields were too wet to hoe or plow or even harvest. Instead of staying in the house when it rained, as others did, he took his gun and vanished into the dripping forest.

There is a good deal of testimony that Boone never minded falling weather. In fact he seemed to enjoy rain, for damp woods were good for hunting, and he rarely stopped a hunt because of falling snow. He may have been one of those who feel the woods are more alive in the rain, the air more intimate, immediate with sounds and smells, with moisture and falling drops. Every sound, every leaf, is vivid. In wet woods you can step without making a sound. In rain he was alone with the trees and brush, the cane and mosses and the animals and birds
that ventured out, feeling safe in the dampness. His hearing was more acute, and his eyesight sharper, without sun dapples and shadows, as the trees dripped and the air ticked and tapped and hummed.

On the Yadkin Daniel began to make a substantial profit with his gun and traps. Deer hides and bearskins were worth several shillings each. Bear bacon was the favorite meat of the place and time. Furs and ginseng could be traded for cash and for more lead and powder, metal traps, a beaver felt hat. Bear Creek in the Yadkin Valley was supposedly so named because one winter Daniel killed ninety-one bears along its banks. And Daniel and an unnamed companion were said to have killed thirty deer in one day. Deer were more important for the hides than the venison, which was often tough and stringy.

Before the white trappers introduced the metal trap, the Indians had depended on snares and dead falls, pits and arrows. Animals could be caught in nets spread under leaves that wrapped the prey up when the trigger was sprung and jerked them up to hang high in the air. Small animals could be caught in nooses. A mink or otter was more likely to be taken in a deadfall, a rock or heavy log fixed to hit its victim when a trigger was tripped.
Beaver were usually speared with a barbed gig
. The Indians knew how to attract beavers with castoreum, a scent taken from the gland of another beaver. Bigger animals such as foxes and wolves could be taken in pits dug in trails and covered with thin sticks and leaves and a trap door that tipped the animal into the deep hole.

The Indians were adept with their methods, perfected over thousands of years. They used furs for clothing and decoration, ceremonies and talismanic signs, for crafting pouches, quivers, and headdresses, for trading with other tribes. When the Europeans arrived, the Indians discovered furs were their most valuable commodity. Wars were fought and whole villages massacred over the fur trade, once the traders made fur so important. Religious orders established missions in Canada and farther south, partly to save the souls of Indians and partly to serve as forts to protect the lucrative fur trade. Conflicts over the regions of
supply, and control of the tribes, contributed to the so-called French and Indian War of the 1750s and 1760s.

With traditional methods Native trappers might gather scores of skins from creek banks and high valleys in a season, but with hand-forged iron traps they could garner thousands in the same time. The action of a metal trap is a powerful spring shaped like tongs. When the tongs are pressed closed, the jaws of the trap fall open as semicircles on hinges. When the trigger is slipped in place, caught in the “dog,” the jaws stay open. On the trigger is a pan almost like a coin, and when the pan is pressed the jaws slam shut. Some traps have jaws with sharp teeth. Daniel Boone knew how to make iron traps and repair them. Such traps were crafted in all sizes, then as now, from tiny ones to catch muskrats and weasels, larger ones to catch otter and fox, still larger for beaver, and biggest of all for bear. A bear trap was so powerful it had to be set with clamps, and it could break a man’s leg. On dry land, on a trail, a trap was baited with scents or meat, and carefully hidden under leaves or duff to snap on a fox or wolf, panther or bear. Hardest of all to catch was a fox, which seemed able to smell a human touch no matter how many times a trap had been boiled and handled with boiled gloves.