Boone: A Biography (18 page)

The Shawnees, led by a chief who called himself Capt. Will Emery (Indian chiefs often took English names and the title of captain), loaded a fortune in hides and furs on the hunters’ own packhorses. Shawnees had only a few horses then. Captain Will apparently had no interest in harming Boone and Stewart. The Shawnees took all they had and gave them in return a small supply of powder and lead and a cheap musket. But Captain Will warned Boone, before he left, to go home and not return to Kentucky, “
for this is Indians’ hunting ground
, and all the animals, skins and furs are ours; and if you are so foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellow-jackets will sting you severely.” Captain Will probably thought he was being correct, even generous, to the trespassers and poachers from North Carolina. By his code, he was treating Boone and Stewart with respect. Boone took it all with apparent good cheer and shook hands with his captors.

By the time Boone and Stewart encountered Will Emery and his band of Shawnees that December day in 1769, “
[t]he Shawnees . . . were a scattered people
, living in small contingents and mingling with other Indian groups in Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Pennsylvania,” Stephen Aron tells us. As many as two hundred had lived in the village of Eskippakithiki in 1736, but that village had been abandoned by 1769. Many Shawnees lived in what would become Ohio on the Scioto and Little Miami rivers. War, disease, internal conflicts, displacement, had
already diminished the Shawnee population by the time they returned to their old homeland in the Ohio country.
Different groups of Indians lived
in their villages, making the villages home to an assortment of refugees from other tribes, as well as several adopted whites.
At Chillicothe at least three languages
were spoken by the residents.

Shawnees and other Indians were relatively tolerant of hunters of either race who were only killing for meat. Everyone had a right to eat. But hunters accumulating furs and deer hides to sell angered them.
Indians had fought among themselves
over hunting rights so long some had indeed come to call it the “Dark and Bloody Ground.”
The Reverend David McClure recorded
an account of Indian hunters presenting their furs and meat to widows and the elderly. Hunters were honored for providing for their kin and for the aged who could no longer hunt themselves. Indian courtesy required that the first game killed on a hunt be presented to a hunting partner. Indians did not deplete the game at the rate white hunters did, not because they were less interested in demonstrating their mastery as hunters, but because of the ethic of killing only for need. Believing that it angered the spirits of animals to kill wantonly, Indian hunters restrained their killing, while white hunters were known to shoot large animals such as buffalo and elk for diversion, for target practice.

It took several days for the Shawnees to loot and destroy all the group’s hunting camps. When they finally left for their towns north of the Ohio River, Findley and the others emerged from the forest. They were devastated by their losses, and deeply shaken by the sudden appearance of and destruction wrought by the Shawnees. Findley, Moore, Holder, and Cooley said they had had enough of Kentucky. They were going back to North Carolina. But Boone was determined to retrieve some of the wealth that had been taken from them. At the very least they might steal back some of the horses. Otherwise they would have to walk back to North Carolina. With horses they could return to the Yadkin for necessary supplies.

Boone and Stewart started out after the Shawnees and caught up
with them in a few days. They watched the Indian camp until the small hours of the night, then crept to the clearing where the horses were hobbled and took four or five of the mounts, among them an Indian pony.

For a day and a night Boone and Stewart rode south toward Station Camp. But on the second day, as they were resting themselves and their horses, they heard a rumbling of hoofbeats, and suddenly the Shawnees rode out of the woods upon them. “
Steal horse, ha?
” one of the Shawnees said, and they threatened Boone and Stewart with tomahawks. They laughed and mocked the white men for being so clumsy. They took a bell from a horse and put it on Boone and made him dance and prance around the clearing while they laughed at him. And then they took their prisoners and horses and started north again.

This episode shows Boone with his guard down. Since they had not seen any Indians in the first seven months in Kentucky, he was not taking the necessary precautions. And after stealing the horses, he and Stewart made no effort to cover their tracks. They hoped to outrun the Shawnees or assumed the Indians would write off the loss of the horses and continue on to their villages.

As the Shawnees and their captives began the march north again, Boone and Stewart submitted gracefully to their fate.
Boone later said he was pretty sure
they could escape if they were patient. On their part the Shawnees seemed more amused than angry with their prisoners. Every day they hinted that the next day Boone and Stewart would be freed, but when the next day came they continued their journey toward the Ohio. At night Boone and Stewart were not bound, but each was forced to sleep between two Indians.

On the seventh day, when they were almost within sight of the Ohio River, the band camped beside a thick canebrake, between the Lower Blue Licks and the mouth of Cabin Creek on
la belle rivière
. While the Indians were gathering wood for the cooking fires and hobbling the horses, Daniel signaled to his friend it was time to escape. Each grabbed a gun and powder and lead and plunged into the cane before
their captors realized what was happening. It was getting dark, and the Indians secured the horses to prevent them from being stolen. They acted reluctant to enter the cane to search, for the cane was thick and it was already getting dark. Boone and Stewart inched their way through the stalks and then into the forest. Walking all night, guided by the stars, they made it back to their old camp in about twenty-four hours of continuous walking.

But Station Camp had been abandoned, though warm ashes from a campfire indicated someone had only just left. Boone and Stewart, without pausing, followed Findley and the others south and overtook them on the Rockcastle River. After a dash of almost a hundred miles Boone was pleased to find that his brother Squire had arrived with much-needed new supplies and a friend named Alexander Neely. According to Filson’s account, Boone was overjoyed at seeing his brother, and exhilarated by his escape from the Shawnees. “
Our meeting so fortunately
in the wilderness made us reciprocally sensible of the utmost satisfaction.”

No one has ever explained why Squire Boone, ten years younger than Daniel, chose to look for his brother at this time, in the middle of winter, or how he was able to find Boone. It is clear that Squire was an accomplished woodsman himself.
According to some reports
he and Neely had failed to find Boone, and Squire was devastated, heading back to Cumberland Gap and the settlements. It is quite possible that Squire had been sent out by Richard Henderson to find and resupply Boone and his party, and to bring back the furs and hides they had accumulated. Somebody had provided the horses and provisions Squire and Neely brought. Since Squire was usually in debt as much as Daniel, it is unlikely he funded the mission himself.
Archibald Henderson would state positively
it was Richard Henderson who sent Squire to Kentucky.

Findley and the three others were determined to return to North Carolina, but Boone and Stewart were equally determined, now that Squire had arrived with fresh supplies, to stay and hunt to make up some
of the losses to the Shawnees. If Boone was deeply in debt back on the Yadkin, and evidence suggests that he was, then he had an additional incentive to stay through the winter. Beaver skins probably offered his only real hope of paying off his creditors. Much as he may have missed Rebecca and his children, he had other calls to duty to heed. And he had his intelligence on the land of Kentucky to gather and compile. That Squire and Neely agreed to stay and help with the hunt only confirmed his decision.
Boone never saw John Findley again
, and it is thought Findley was killed by Indians while on another trading trip in 1771.

T
HE STREAMS
of Kentucky were filled with beaver and beaver dams, with otters and mink. Even among such abundance, some skill was required in the preservation of fur. While beaver pelts are cut so they can be stretched out flat on hoops of grape vine or hickory withes, mink and otter skins are peeled off whole so they can be stretched over boards or limbs, inside out, to dry and cure. In the winter of 1770 the Boone brothers, with Stewart and Neely, directed all their hopes and all their efforts toward trapping. They had a substantial supply of jerk and bear meat, dried buffalo tongues, and in the camp they were warmed by buffalo robes and bearskins. At night they slept with bare feet to the fire while moccasins and leggings dried.

It may have been in this period that they read by the campfire a copy of
Gulliver’s Travels
, which Neely had brought with him. In a deposition given years later in a land dispute, Boone described their habit of reading. “
Saith that in the year 1770
I encamped on the Red River with five other men and we had with us for our amusement the History of Samuel Gulever’s Travels where In he gave an account of his young Mistress Glomdelclerk carrying him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud.” (It is not clear whether Boone is referring in this deposition to the five men who came with him to Kentucky in 1769 or to other hunters who may have joined him and Squire, Stewart and Neely, on Lulbegrud Creek.)

As January turned into February, Squire and Neely hunted and
walked the traplines together, while Boone and Stewart split up to cover separate territories, being already familiar with the region. They agreed to meet at the camp every two weeks. They had made a small canoe out of bark for crossing the Kentucky River and to reach traps along the river and its branches.

A hard winter rain began and continued for many days, and the river raged in flood. When the appointed day for their meeting came, Stewart did not appear. As the flood subsided, Boone crossed the river and found the remains of a campfire near a tree where Stewart’s initials had been carved. There were no other signs of his friend. Boone vowed he would not return to North Carolina until he had found Stewart.

The disappearance of Stewart was an intimidating mystery. He seemed to have vanished into the damp winter air. But five years later, while Boone and his crew were hacking out Boone’s Trace, the bones of a man were discovered in a hollow sycamore tree near the area where Stewart disappeared. Boone examined the remains and found a powder horn with John Stewart’s initials scratched on the brass band. The left arm had been broken, but the skull was intact. There was no sign of his rifle.

The most likely explanation was that he had been attacked by Indians, was wounded, and lost his rifle. Fleeing into the woods, he found the hollow sycamore and hid, and there he had either frozen to death or bled to death. “
My father always thought that Stewart
either got killed or sickened and died in the wilderness,” Nathan told Draper.

Alexander Neely was so shaken by the disappearance of Stewart that he decided to return to the settlements. After he was gone, the Boone brothers, committing themselves to a longer stay, still hoping to find Stewart, built a better shelter on the banks of the Kentucky River. Having plenty of meat, they again directed their efforts toward gathering furs. Boone told Filson, “
We were then in a dangerous, helpless
situation, exposed daily to perils and death amongst the savages and wild beasts, not a white man in the country but ourselves . . . Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling
wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced.”

B
Y THE TIME
spring arrived and the trapping season came to an end, Boone and Squire had caught and cured a valuable stock of furs. They were running low on ammunition and supplies. It would have seemed the natural time to return to the Yadkin, but Boone decided that only Squire would take the packhorse carrying their treasure of furs, sell the harvest, and put in crops in North Carolina. He himself would stay in Kentucky to hunt deer and explore.

There has been a good deal of speculation about Boone’s decision to stay a second year in Kentucky. It would have seemed logical for him to have returned to his family in the spring, grow a crop of corn, and return to Kentucky in late fall. A number of motives for his staying in 1770 have been advanced: he was still avoiding creditors, he needed to make further explorations for Henderson, he felt guilty about Stewart and was still trying to find his friend. Others have said that the game was so plentiful that Boone could not tear himself away from the hunt.

Any or all of these motives may have been factors in his decision to stay alone while Squire returned to the Yadkin. Likely there were still regions of Kentucky he needed to explore for his own satisfaction and his report to Henderson. But there may have been other reasons too, some hard to define. Now thirty-five years old, Boone had reached the age when a man of ambition and vision has to define himself. Frustrated by his failures at farming, in debt, unsuccessful previously in reaching Kentucky, he could not give it up now that he was finally there. He may have sensed that this was his moment, his destiny. In his midthirties a man either reaches out toward risk and glory or stays within the routines of the expected and ordinary. It is the age when men leave safe homes and jobs and go on voyages, odysseys, perform transforming sacrifices. It is the age when Whitman wrote
Leaves of Grass
and Columbus started to plan his voyage to the Indies. It is the
age at which visionaries become prophets or explorers or inventors, or make fools of themselves trying. Putting behind him his accumulated failures and humiliations, such a man must seize the new prospect and ride with it to greatness or defeat. There is no turning back.