Boone: A Biography (19 page)

When Boone decided to stay alone in the forests of Kentucky while his brother Squire returned to conduct business, he made a choice that revealed himself to himself. He would not do what most other men would do. He would not be just a commercial trapper. He was that, but he was something else too. There was something he wanted to learn in the wilderness, and he needed to be alone. He had hunted alone before, for days and weeks. But what he needed to learn was here, and he couldn’t say exactly what it was, but he sensed the uniqueness of the opportunity. He had been given a role to play, the best role he had ever known, and he meant to make the most of it.

“
He now proceeded to make
those remarkable solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality.” Boone was a leader and an English-speaking colonial. He had been called a white Indian, and he was an expert marksman, scout, trapper, navigator of the forest. He was a woodsman, but there was more, and he knew he was seeking more. In the name of his people, and perhaps Richard Henderson as well, and his own nature, he was spying on the western wilderness, as if there was a secret he must obtain. It was beyond the next ridge, and it was farther down the river of his days, the intelligence he must gather. Two years may be the time it takes to leave behind one’s old self and see the world in a larger, clearer way. It would be the time Thoreau spent in his cabin at Walden, the definitive period of his life. It was the time Goethe spent in Italy in 1786–88, in a visit that transformed his vision of himself and his future.

Some would have said it was fame Boone was seeking in Kentucky, without quite knowing it, and they would not be entirely wrong. For fame was one facet of what he felt immanent inside himself. He wanted to be known across the reaches of geography, across the boundaries of time. But it was more than that, something sacred, almost like religion.
It was something he shared with the Indians more than with white people. It was about his contemplation of the clouds over the grasslands and the wooded ridge, and the sunset over the hurrying river. It was about how time would seem to stop even as the stars came out. He must play his part in the great curve of time. It was about the lay of the new land just waiting for him to see and walk over it.

Boone studied the different kinds of springs in the land, the springs that boiled out of limestone, the cove springs deep in hollows, cave springs that issued out of caverns, salt springs surrounded by licks, sulfur springs. He studied the bones exposed in the raw salt licks. He must know this land as a man knows a beloved woman. He was determined to keep out of sight as he pursued his passion. And somehow he felt he was chosen. It was not just his decision after all. It was as if he had been separated out for this mission of relish and discovery. It was a moment that would never come again, not in his lifetime, not in ten thousand years, and he had been sent there and burdened with the desire to cherish it. There were other hunters and scouts with their eye on Kentucky, and speculators greedy to claim it, but he was not responsible for them. His duty was to this mission. He had been called out, as others are inspired to preach or nurse the sick or lead in battle. He would not tell anyone what it was, not even Richard Henderson, and he would keep his humor and his wit, and modesty, but he knew he had been given a sign and a window, and he must step across that threshold.

“
Boone deliberately chose the peace
of solitude, rather than mingle in the wild wranglings and disputings of the society around him—from whom it was ever his first thought to be escaping—or he would never have penetrated to those secret places where later his name became talisman,” wrote William Carlos Williams.

B
OONE TOLD
Filson that after Squire left him on May 1, 1770, he was tempted to plunge into a deep melancholy. He was without salt, sugar, bread, companions, even a horse or a dog. “
The idea of a beloved wife
and family and their anxiety upon the account of my absence . . . made sensible impressions on my heart. A thousand dreadful apprehensions presented themselves to my view, and had undoubtedly disposed me to melancholy, if further indulged.”

Philosophers of the sublime have long stressed the combination of delight and fear. The most intense experiences, indeed the sublime itself, is a mingling of terror and joy. The danger of the Kentucky wilderness intensified Boone’s relish for its wonders.

As the summer continued, Boone ran so low on powder and lead he had to give up hunting for hides and hunt only for subsistence. This provided him with an excuse to devote more time to exploration. In these weeks and months he appears to have crossed all the land from the Licking River west to the Ohio at the Falls. It was the most beautiful part of Kentucky, and many have considered Kentucky the most beautiful place in North America. Near the end of his life Boone was described as “
naturally romantic and fond of the chase
” and at no point in his life did he fit that label better than in his first exploration of Kentucky.

Among the many salt and sulfur licks Boone found in the limestone country was the famous Big Bone Lick near the Ohio between future Cincinnati and the mouth of the Kentucky River. He was by no means the first white explorer to see this curiosity of the Middle Ground. French traders had seen it as early as 1735 and reported finding the skeletons of “
seven elephants
.” Christopher Gist had seen the site on his 1750–51 expedition. And many others, including Thomas Ashe, had described the “
giant sloths and giant beaver bones
at Big Bone Lick.” The size of the bones and their number gave the place an air of fantasy. There were tusks five feet long and teeth weighing four pounds. Nearby was a medicinal spring whose waters, Filson would later say, could
cure “the itch by once bathing
.”

The caves of Kentucky are one of the most spectacular features of the region. Indians had taken shelter in them and explored the covert passages for thousands of years, and animals had lived in them long
before that. Underneath the surface of much of Kentucky, including some of the Bluegrass area, conditions were perfect for cave formation, beginning with a water-soluble layer of limestone. With plenty of rainfall, runoff picked up carbon dioxide from the air and soil to make carbonic acid that seeped downward through faults and crevices, eating away the rock, to reach a base water level where pools and streams gathered. Rotting vegetation on the surface produced even more acid to cut away at the limestone.

The pools and streams that collected underground made tubes and tunnels, draining toward river basins, creating gutters, a maze of abandoned drains. Because of the many colors of the salts and stone, the underground chambers and corridors lit up like flower gardens, chapels, sculpture salons, when a torch was brought into the whispering, dripping passages, opening into one another like chains of buried memories, half-suppressed dreams. Besides bats, crickets, rats, turtles, and salamanders, animals that came in and left the caves, there were permanent residents of the dark hallways, alcoves, and grottoes: white eyeless fish, crayfish, flatworms, beetles, and spiders.

The water and minerals made their own decorations, stalagmites and stalactites that resembled trees, statues, drapery. Colorful streaks called bacon festooned the walls. Cave pearls were made by the tumbling action of dripping water.
Other formations were called
snowballs, gypsum flowers, angel hair, cave cotton, cave grass. Some stalagmites were translucent as flesh.

The shadow world of the caves was no less a wonderland than the landscape above. Boone lived in many caves and carved his initials on several, as did other white hunters. Indians before them had left their talismanic signs on the hidden surfaces. The caves were a refuge, a secret world, sanctuary for the wet and cold, the pursued and frightened. It was a land beneath the threshold of hunting and settlement, multiplying the mysteries that Kentucky offered.

Several times during this summer of wandering, Boone saw Indians but hid before they spotted him. Of course they may have been
watching him and he never knew it. He built small cooking fires of dry wood that made little smoke, usually hidden by rocks or bark walls he took care to construct to conceal the flames. Often he did without a fire and slept in a canebrake for safety. At the Falls of the Ohio, where Louisville would later be built, he found a recently dead horse at the foot of the falls and saw the ruins of a chimney and cabin. It is possible the camp had been built by his former partner, John Findley, when he traded at the Falls in 1752.

Striking east from the Ohio, Boone traveled to the Kentucky River about where Frankfort would later be. There, he said afterward, he saw an Indian on a log over the river fishing. “
While I was looking at him
, he tumbled into the river, and I saw no more of him,” Boone reportedly told his son Nathan, implying that he had killed the Indian. It is one of the few incidents reported by Nathan that does not ring true. And though Isaac Boone, a cousin of Daniel’s, said he heard the same story from Daniel in his later years, the anecdote sounds more like a punch line than a true incident.

Shooting an unsuspecting Indian in cold blood is out of character with everything we know about Boone and his dealings with Indians. Of course people sometimes act out of character, but it is hard to believe the man who never retaliated against the Indians for torturing and killing his son James and killing his brother Ned would shoot an Indian who had not harmed him and then brag about it. “
It was understood
from the way in which he spoke of it that he had shot and killed the Indian; yet he seemed not to care about alluding more particularly to it,” Nathan told Draper.

Beyond the issue of Boone’s known character there are the considerations of practicality and safety. A man nearly out of powder and lead, spying an Indian fishing, would almost certainly back away into the forest and save his ammunition until it was needed. And a shot would alert other Indians who might be hunting or fishing nearby. Boone’s story makes it sound as though he shot the Indian on a whim. It seems likely it was a joke the old man liked to tell to entertain his
visitors. He was also known to tell tales about encountering great hairy monsters like the yahoos in
Gulliver’s Travels
. Most likely it never happened. Boone didn’t actually state that he killed the Indian fisherman; he let his listeners assume that’s what he meant, and was reluctant to say more.

But Draper takes the story as fact and, to excuse the murder by calling it self-defense, says, “
and it may have been the means
of preserving his life for great future usefulness to his family and country.” He ignores the implausibility of the quip and its dry humor in the context.

I
T APPEARS
that Boone stayed awhile in a cave on Shawanoe Run, a tributary of the Kentucky River, that summer. A tree over the entrance once had “
D.B.—1770” carved on it
. Years later the remains of campfires were found on the cave floor. It is still called Boone’s Cave.

On the nearby Dix (Dick’s) River another of the legendary events of Boone’s career supposedly occurred that summer. As he told it,
Boone was surprised by Indians
on a bluff over Dix River, less than a mile above the junction with the Kentucky River. The bank far below was covered with trees that reached up within a few feet of the bluff. Rather than surrender, Boone said he
took a leap
into the top of a sugar maple, and the top bent with his weight, cushioning his fall, as he grabbed on to an upper limb. He then dropped from branch to branch until he reached the ground sixty feet below. On the riverbank he ran through the thickets, then swam the stream, leaving the Indians stunned by the speed of his escape. Though Isaiah Boone, Daniel’s nephew, and several scholars have expressed skepticism about the anecdote, it could be true. As a boy Boone had probably climbed and learned to ride a bending treetop, drop from limb to limb to the ground. With practice an agile boy could reach the ground in seconds from the top of the tallest trees, breaking his fall by grasping one limb and swinging to the next, all the way to the forest floor.

Boone’s solitary wanderings seemed to make him more alert, more vigorous, more certain of his purpose. “
To many it would have been
the means of weakening the mind, but in Boone it only seems to have renewed his energies,” the biographer W. H. Bogart says. “In the three months that no response awaited the word, he learned how much the thought could speak.” In the account Filson gives us of this summer, Boone sleeps in canebrakes and thickets, fearing Indians are watching his camps. Wolves howl in the night and circle. Ignoring fear, he luxuriates in the solitude and plenty of the forest. It is his definitive period, when his truest and best self emerges and clarifies its essential nature. “
For three months he was alone
,” William Carlos Williams says. “Surely he must have known that it was the great ecstatic moment of his life’s affirmation.” Like Alexander Selkirk, the sailor who was the model for Robinson Crusoe, before him, Boone may have “
seen deep truths about himself
revealed through the cleansing simplicity of the demands of survival.”

On July 27, 1770, Squire Boone returned to Kentucky. With the money from the furs, Squire had paid some of Boone’s debts and bought new supplies. He had assured Rebecca that Boone was well and thriving and would return after another trapping season. Squire may well have brought Boone a message from Richard Henderson with the additional supplies. Each brother had achieved success in his separate mission. For safety the brothers moved to a cave near the mouth of Marble Creek on the Kentucky River. Here they lived for two months, then moved to another cave farther down the river near the mouth of Hickman Creek. Boone carved his initials on the walls of each of these caves, and a nearby bluff was called Boone’s Knob.

But for safety and convenience in their hunting, Boone and Squire kept moving. To avoid detection they stayed in no camp for very long. Once returning from a hunt, they found their camp had been raided and many supplies stolen. Blankets, moccasins, leggings, were missing. Even the kettle had disappeared. Finding wolf tracks, they followed them to a den under a blown-down tree, where wolf cubs slept on the remains of one of their blankets.
They killed the mother wolf
, recovered
the kettle she had stolen, and tried to tame the cubs as pets but without success.