Boone: A Biography (15 page)

There is no more important milestone in a man’s life than the death of his father. The death of a father may bring its own cloud of grief or regret, a sense of unfinished business, of questions that will forever go unanswered. A son feels alone in a particular way when his father dies. Suddenly he is on his own, and there may be a new sense of freedom, that whatever has to be done is now up to him. The rest of life opens before the son, and there is no one he has to answer to but himself and the future. And the future is all too short, though it is a sweeping
vista of obligation. The death of a father is a time for reaching out, for stretching, moving ahead.

When some friends from Virginia arrived on the Yadkin in late summer of 1765 and announced they were on their way to Florida, Boone decided to go with them. He should have been harvesting his crops, preparing his house for cold weather, and getting ready for the trapping season. But this adventure to the mysterious world of Florida could not be resisted. And it would not hurt to be away from the constant reminders of his debts. Perhaps his future and fortune lay far to the south, in Florida. From the scant records that exist, we can construe that the trip south was something of a frolic of young males. His brother Squire went along, and his brother-in-law—Hannah’s husband—John Stewart. Free land had been announced in the Panhandle of Florida after England acquired the region from France and Spain with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and the eight young men were going down to have a look. Planning to hunt along the way, they traveled south to Fort Ninety-Six in South Carolina, then to Savannah, and on to St. Augustine.

One document from the trip records
Boone losing three pounds at dice. His companion, named Slaughter, was apparently an expert gambler. According to Nathan Boone, “
Slaughter was fond of gambling
and won money going and coming back from Florida. This along with the deer skins of the party, was enough to meet most of their expenses while passing through the settlements.” In later years Boone described this journey as if it was an extended holiday, with exotic scenery, birds, and pretty Spanish and Indian girls.

But when the party turned to hunting in the hammock country of the St. Johns River basin, they found the swamps and thickets of Florida rough going. The country was almost impassable and easy to get lost in. Florida seemed to be mostly
muddy trails and swamps, with little game
other than alligators. John Stewart, who was an excellent woodsman and hunter, got lost and wandered on his own for several
days. The others in the group became so lost they were rescued by Seminoles, who took them to their village and fed them. The vine-entangled marshes of Florida were very different from the woodlands of the Appalachians, which ironically De Soto had named for the Apalachee Indians, who lived on the Florida Panhandle.

In Pensacola Boone is supposed to have made a down payment on a house and tract of land, perhaps with money from deer hides harvested along the way. It would seem that he planned to return to Florida with his family to settle in the regional capital. He was a man of enthusiasm and curiosity, and the strange and forbidding country seemed to have worked a spell on him, though he later told Nathan that Florida was devoid of game except for deer and birds.

From the Panhandle the company explored their way back north, taking a route through the Creek country that would be traveled a few years later by William Bartram and described in his classic prose. They reached Augusta and the Savannah River. Near the end of the journey Boone delayed their progress so he could keep his promise to Rebecca to arrive home on Christmas Day.

According to his son Nathan, Boone announced that Christmas Day on the Yadkin, as they celebrated his return, that he had bought land in Florida and planned to move them there. But Rebecca, however happy she was to have her husband home again, flatly refused to go that far south. Florida was too distant from her family and friends. A few months before, she had refused to move into the wilderness to the west and north of the Yadkin. These are the only reported instances in the many years of their marriage when she absolutely put her foot down against Boone’s notions and whims and would not budge. None of the stories recounted afterward explain any special circumstances, and a few years later Rebecca was willing to accompany Boone into the very dangerous land of Kentucky. But on their moves they were always accompanied by many friends and kin. Wherever Boone was to find his destiny, it would not be in Florida.

I
N THE FALL
of 1766 Rebecca agreed to move several miles up the Yadkin to Holman’s Ford, near the Brushy Mountains. This area was much less settled than the Sugartree Creek community. The next spring, after Daniel returned from his long hunt, they moved again, farther up the valley to the mouth of Beaver Creek. The next year they moved yet again, to the opposite side of the river, and Boone built a cabin on a hill looking south across the Yadkin.

On this move up the river Rebecca and Boone were accompanied by a number of relatives, including Boone’s brother George and his wife, who was a cousin to Rebecca, and his brother Ned, married to Rebecca’s sister Martha. Boone’s brother Squire moved to the area also, as did his sister Hannah and her husband, John Stewart, one of Boone’s favorite hunting companions, an excellent woodsman, and a man who could be depended on, even if he did get lost in Florida.

It was a pattern repeated again and again. A hunter who loved the solitude of the forest, Boone was also a part of an extended, close-knit community of relatives and friends that stayed with him in different combinations throughout his many moves on the Yadkin, across the mountains into Kentucky, and eventually all the way to Missouri. In the late 1760s they were settling the area around the future Wilkesboro, North Carolina, at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

At the mouth of Beaver Creek, Boone was within a day’s ride of his favorite hunting camp high in the Blue Ridge. Many quotes about his urge to stay two steps ahead of civilization date from this period. A story told on the Yadkin many years after he had left has him commenting after someone has cleared a farm twelve miles away from his, “
The place is getting entirely too
thickly settled when a man can come and cut down trees without permission in your back yard.”

In 1767 Benjamin Cutbirth and John Stewart and other young men from the Yadkin set out on an extended hunt into the western wilderness that took them all the way to New Orleans.
They had many narrow escapes
from snags in the river, whirlpools, tornadoes, and Indian attacks. They were robbed of all the wealth from furs they
sold but nevertheless became local heroes for their daring expedition. Cutbirth’s story of their journey only whetted Boone’s determination to find the way through the mountains “
leading to the Mesopotamia of Kentucky
.”

I
N THE FALL
and winter of 1767–68 Boone made what was perhaps his most extended hunt yet beyond the Blue Ridge and the Smokies, searching for his fortune. Since meeting the Irish peddler John Findley on the trail to Braddock’s Defeat in 1755, he had been thinking about the place called Kanta-ke, about the legendary hunting ground beyond the mountains. With his brother Squire and a neighbor named William Hill he crossed the ridges to the Holston River and then the Clinch River. From there they crossed farther mountains into the headwaters of a river that flowed north, later to be called the Big Sandy. It is possible that Boone mistook the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy for the headwaters of the Louisa or Kentucky River.
His plan was to reach
the Ohio River and follow it down to the falls that Findley had described to him in 1755.

Following a buffalo trace that ran roughly where Highway 23, the Country Music Highway, goes now, they came to a salt lick near present day Prestonsburg, Kentucky. Here they were trapped by a deep snow and forced to stay in camp most of the winter. But there was plenty of game around the salt lick, and the party lived on buffalo and bear meat. The place was especially notable for the number of bears nearby. Without knowing it, Boone was within the boundaries of the future state of Kentucky. But the place looked nothing like the cane lands and clover and bluegrass he had heard described by the peddler John Findley. The Kanta-ke Boone had heard praised around the campfires in 1755 was a land of meadows, savannas, with groves of hickory, oaks, and sugar maples. It was a land of wide rivers and buffalo grazing as far as the sight could reach, with bold salt springs where the game animals gathered to lick the salty dirt as though presenting themselves to be taken. Kanta-ke was a land of endless beaver, of fur beyond counting.
Kanta-ke was paradise on earth, an island in the wilderness, the land of heart’s desire.

The beaver skins of Kanta-ke were not as valuable as beaver taken farther north or at higher elevations, where, because of colder weather, the fur was thicker, more luxuriant. But the streams of Kanta-ke were also rippling with fur besides beaver—with otter and mink, muskrat. Deer and elk, bears and panthers, foxes and raccoons, haunted the woods and streams there. Incredibly, the bounty was to be taken by whoever could find his way there over the mountains or down
la belle rivière
, the Ohio, and bring the fortune in furs back. The problem in Kanta-ke was not to gather fur and hides and meat but to transport them all the way back to the eastern markets, through hundreds of miles of Indian country. While Boone was exploring the headwaters of the Big Sandy, Findley was just across the mountains trading with the Indians in Kanta-ke.

The Boones and Hill returned to the Yadkin in the spring, with little to show for their winter hunt near the Big Sandy. Boone put in a crop as usual and planned his hunting trip for the next fall. At just this time John Findley reappeared in Boone’s life. Apparently they met again by accident, the peddler roving into the upper Yadkin to sell his pins and needles, threads and thimbles, and discovering that Boone was there. The Boone children later recalled the colorful tales the peddler told of the promised land of Kanta-ke.
He entertained the folks
and charmed them with tall tales to help sell his goods and to find a place to stay for the night.

As Boone and Findley talked, after not having seen each other for thirteen years, Findley admitted he was a peddler and adventurer, not a scout or woodsman. But with a hunter as accomplished as Boone, surely they could follow the Warrior’s Path west and find the defile in the mountains that led to the golden plains of Kanta-ke. Cherokee Indians had been going north to fight the Shawnees that way for centuries. And once they reached the Louisa River country, Findley could easily find the lush meadows, the cane lands and clover, the streams
crowded with beaver, and the village of Eskippakithiki, where he had traded with the Indians.

It is possible that Boone had not been able to reach Kentucky before because he was too poor to outfit a successful expedition. He felt that his fate and his future lay in Kentucky, but for such an extended exploration he would need packhorses, a large supply of lead and powder, rifles and traps. Cumberland Gap was hundreds of miles away through the mountains, and the meadows of Kentucky more than a hundred miles beyond the gap. Because he was always in debt, Boone’s credit was not adequate for outfitting such a venture until Findley came along and offered to throw in his lot, and perhaps Richard Henderson and the Hart brothers underwrote some of the expense in hopes of getting both furs and information about the overmountain region.

1769–1771

At the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 the Iroquois ceded their claim to the hunting ground of Kanta-ke to the British, in return for thirty or forty thousand pounds’ worth of trade goods. The Iroquois had attempted to dominate the region for more than a century, keeping the Shawnees and other tribes mostly out of their choice hunting grounds. The Shawnees particularly resented the Iroquois claims to the Ohio Valley, and their fury was fanned by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix because their presence and rights were ignored. The Shawnees were ignored again at the treaties the British made with the Cherokees in South Carolina at Hard Labor in 1768 and at Lochabar in 1770.
Considering the Six Nations the slaves of
the British, the Shawnees sought to organize a general campaign against the whites west of the mountains and sent a “painted hatchet” to the Cherokees, whom they had fought earlier, inviting them to join an attack on the white incursion into Kanta-ke. Contention over hunting rights there may have been the main reason Kanta-ke was almost empty of Indian villages at this particular window in Native history.

At the Treaty of Hard Labor, South Carolina, in October 1768, the British, somewhat ambiguously and contradictorily, conceded that the Cherokees, who lived to the south and east of the Clinch River, had some legal claim to the Kanta-ke region or at least to the southern
portion of it. Hunters and explorers took the Treaty of Fort Stanwix to mean the Great Meadow, the Middle Ground, was open for hunting and possibly even settlement. Entrepreneurs took the Treaty of Hard Labor to mean that Kanta-ke might possibly be bought from the Cherokees. The British government and officials such as the colonial governor of Virginia, as well as speculators like George Washington, saw the Ohio Valley as a place for future development. They had already decided to award tracts of western land to veterans of the French and Indian War. These conflicting treaties and plans set in motion many schemes and designs that would figure in the future of Kanta-ke. Among the many schemers and dreamers were Daniel Boone and John Findley on the upper Yadkin. Boone had failed in his previous expeditions, but he was eager to try again. The historian Daniel Blake Smith would later write, “
Kentucky was, first and perhaps foremost
, an idea. It was an idea born of need and hope.”

On May 1, 1769, Daniel Boone, John Findley, and John Stewart, with three assistants who were to serve as camp workers, left the upper Yadkin with the hope of reaching Kentucky. Their supplies and equipment were loaded on as many as fifteen packhorses. This May Day is one of the important turning points not only in Boone’s life but also in the western progress of the frontier just on the eve of the Revolution and birth of the Republic.