Boone: A Biography (20 page)

At the end of the deer season the brothers packed up the hides for Squire to take back to the settlements. It had been a good year. Again Boone was alone in the wilderness for many weeks. But heavy rains delayed Squire’s return from the Yadkin. Impatient and worried, Boone set out to meet his brother. On the way he encountered an old Indian man left in the woods to die. Boone gave him most of the meat of a deer he had killed. Hurrying ahead, Boone spied what appeared to be a tree on fire. Approaching warily, he discovered to his relief it was the camp of the returning Squire, who had brought with him additional supplies as well as packhorses.

I
T HAS BEEN
suggested that people of genius do their great work in a decade’s time. For mathematicians and physicists the decade is often their twenties; for poets and composers the best years are usually their thirties. For others the glory period may come later. But in each case their lives lead up to the ten years of inspiration and greatness, peak, and then trail away into years of more ordinary achievement. Examples cited are romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had their years of towering accomplishment from about 1798 to 1808, or Walt Whitman, who wrote most of his best work between 1854 and 1865. Emerson did almost all his greatest writing between about 1835 and 1846. Though Daniel Boone was a frontiersman and explorer, not an artist of words, he embodies and enacts many of the qualities and ideas Romantic writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman would later articulate.

It is hard not to think of Boone when we read Emerson on solitude (“
But if a man would be alone
, let him look at the stars”), or Thoreau on walking and wildness. The self-reliance, the intense curiosity, and relish of experience in Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the peaceableness and love of the wild, suggest Boone more than any other single historical person. Whitman also came from a family of Quakers. Boone was a
great Romantic artist, but his work of art was his life, his example of attention, exhilaration, and contemplation. “
Prayer is the contemplation of
the facts of life from the highest point of view,” Emerson said, echoing the spirit of the scout and explorer. Fifty years after Boone explored Kentucky and relished its wilderness for two years without returning to the settlements, the Hudson River painters captured something of his transcendental view of the mountains and rivers in their art. Boone saw nature as both fact and fable, and every cloud and sunset, tree and blade of grass, as instance of both the real and the ideal, physical and spiritual. Everyone who ever interviewed him mentioned his calm and his poise. The sense of the spiritual was something he shared with the Indians and likely learned, in part, from them. Every tree and river, rock and cloud, was alive, haunted, significant.

After Boone would come many other great naturalists and artists, but none of them would have the legendary status of Boone, the air of the original. None had so much influence or inspired so many who came after. Like Washington, like Lincoln later, Boone inspired the craving for an ideal self, with Quaker tolerance for others, reliant and integrious, with a large capacity for wonder and reaching out toward the new and mysterious, brave but cautious, sociable, diplomatic, calm in the face of danger. A lover of song and reading, a notoriously erratic speller.

Daniel Boone did most of the things for which he is remembered between about 1770 and 1782. He lived until 1820 and was a legend for the last thirty-six years of his life. But the legend is based almost entirely on the events of those eleven or twelve years.

W
HILE
D
ANIEL
and Squire were hunting and trapping and exploring Kentucky in 1770–71, evading Indians and accumulating hides and furs, they were not the only white men in the western wilderness. A number of Virginians were also roving and hunting in the region. In 1769–70 a group including Hancock and Richard Taylor, Abraham Hempinstall, and a man named Barbour descended the Ohio River to the Mississippi
and explored the Arkansas River. Hancock Taylor and Hempinstall went on to New Orleans and sailed from there back to New York, but Richard Taylor and Barbour turned east and explored the Yazoo and the Creek and Choctaw country, reaching Georgia and Florida.

Another large party from Virginia, which included Casper Mansker, explored Powell’s Valley and the Cumberland River in the summer of 1769. They found big herds of buffalo around the salt licks as they worked their way through the Cumberland Valley. A party of Cherokees destroyed their camp. Some of the group returned to the settlements while ten others built canoes and descended the Cumberland to the French Lick, site of future Nashville. Continuing on to the Ohio and Mississippi, they were robbed again by Chickasaws. Descending the river to Natchez, they made their way back home from there.

George Washington, who owned tracts
of land west of the Alleghenies, made another expedition down the Ohio River in 1769–70, getting as far as the mouth of the Kanawha in future West Virginia, and the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy in Kentucky. From journals kept during the journey, it is clear he foresaw trouble between the Indians and settlers who were already making their way from Fort Pitt down into the Ohio Valley. As Joseph J. Ellis phrases it, “
[Washington] looked west to the land
beyond the Alleghenies as the great prize worth fighting for. And although he did not know it at the time, the rewards he received for his soldiering in the form of land grants in the Ohio Country would become the lifetime foundation of his personal wealth.” Washington, like many others, seemed to have an obsession with the West. Ellis points out that this interest even affected the way he remodeled his house.
When Washington renovated
Mount Vernon, he rebuilt the mansion so its main entrance faced west.

Another group who made a foray into the wilderness at the time was a party called the Long Hunters because they stayed in the woods for long periods. They were about fifty in number and included many from earlier hunts such as Casper Mansker, James Drake, and Isaac
Bledsoe, all from the New River area of Virginia. Equipped with three packhorses each, ammunition, traps, hunting dogs, they made their way into Kentucky in the fall of 1770. This group hunted in the same region where the Boones had been busy the year before. James Dysart discovered the Knob Licks, where they saw more than a thousand buffalo. From the region of Dix River they moved west to the Green River, where they killed many deer and collected more hides. But their camp was found by a group of Indians led by Capt. Will Emery, who had captured Boone and Stewart the December before, and their hides were taken or destroyed. Three of the hunters had disappeared and all their supplies were destroyed. “
Upon a large, spreading beech tree
beside the camp, they rudely carved in the bark, ‘Fifteen hundred skins gone to ruination.’” But the remaining men continued the hunt in smaller groups, using the horses and supplies they had left.

During the 1770–71 winter Casper Mansker and several companions were hunting, away from the larger group, in the region of the Green River, when they heard a very odd sound. It seemed neither animal nor Indian. Mansker told the others to stay hidden while he went to investigate. Moving from tree to bush, the way he might approach a deer or Indian camp, the hunter saw a sight that astonished and then made him laugh. Lying on his back on a deerskin in a little clearing, a bare-headed man was singing to the sky.
It was Daniel Boone, alone in the forest
, indulging his love of song and craving a human voice, even if it was his own.

This image of Boone, assuming he was alone, singing in the wilderness, has a resonance that early became part of the legend. Many woodsmen were fond of singing, but it is the story of Boone that has come down to us. Though surrounded by forests, where Indians and wolves and panthers might be prowling, not to mention rival hunters, he is so at ease he lies on his back and sings to the clouds and trees and passing birds. He sings for the sheer joy of hearing a voice.

But why would a man trying to avoid detection by Indians lie in the woods singing at the top of his voice? Boone knew his life and his mission
depended on his ability to fade through the forest without being seen. It seems likely he had already spotted Caspar Mansker and the Long Hunters, had had them under surveillance, perhaps for days, monitoring their wandering, and as they approached he put on a show for them. Lying on his back and singing as they got close, he created another never-to-be-forgotten image of his legend, which we are still talking about.

The sight of Boone singing in the woods resonates with our image of Audubon playing his flute in the wilderness, and Thoreau playing his flute by Walden, and the great Hudson River painter Thomas Cole carrying his flute, along with his brushes and canvas, into the Catskills and Adirondacks to make music by his campfire. This anecdote of Boone the solitary singer resonates also with Whitman’s image of the bird and poet in the Lincoln elegy, “When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed,” and with the Enlightenment sense of harmony in nature and between man and nature. In this vision all creation sounds out in concert if we can just attend to its polyphony.

Casper Mansker’s party spent several days hunting with Daniel and Squire Boone. One has the impression of an exuberant expedition along the Green River. They hunted down along the Cumberland River also, and gave their names to Casper’s River, Drake’s Creek, Skaggs’s Creek, Bledsoe’s Creek. At the French Lick they discovered a group of French hunters had killed all the buffalo for their tongues and left the bodies rotting. With no buffalo to browse on the cane, the brakes had grown impenetrably thick. “
‘Bledsoe told me,’ says General Hall
, that ‘one could walk for several hundred yards in and around the lick and on buffellows skuls, & bones.’”

In March of 1771 Daniel and Squire loaded their furs and hides on the packhorses Squire had brought from North Carolina the previous fall and headed back to the Yadkin. It took them several weeks, searching for the best trails around canebrakes and thickets, the best fords across rivers and rain-swollen creeks, to reach Powell’s Valley. While camped there and hunting for meat, Squire encountered a startling
apparition of a man, gaunt, in torn clothing, dirty, wandering without direction. It was his old friend Alexander Neely.

Neeley had come with a hunting party back to the region around Cumberland Gap and gotten lost. He had fired all his powder, hoping his shots would be heard and he would be rescued. But no one heard him, and he had wandered, helpless without powder, almost starving. One day while he was sitting weak and in despair, a dog appeared and came near him, as if pleased to find a human in the woods. Grabbing the dog by the neck, he cut its throat with his hunting knife and started a fire with the flint of his gun to cook the dog’s carcass. Jerking most of the meat, he packed it in a sack made of the dog’s skin and started out again to find his way.

Squire told Neely he could join the Boones at their camp, but he must eat sparingly, being semistarved for so long. Neely threw away the residue of his dog meat, which Squire saw was infested with maggots. Daniel and Squire nursed him in their camp until he regained his strength. They also mended his clothing, which had been ripped and torn in his rambling. After several days Neely was strong enough to follow after his party of Long Hunters.
It is likely Squire and Daniel
gave him detailed directions for reaching the Cumberland Gap. Years later Squire Boone would visit Neely at his home in the New River Valley.

Anxious to get home with the furs, the Boones followed the Warrior’s Path east, nearing the westernmost settlements of Virginia. Since they had spent the winter and spring on the Cumberland, they may not have known how much war activity was going on among the Indian tribes that spring. The Iroquois were attacking the Cherokees and Catawbas. Shawnees and Delawares were at war with the Cherokees, and the Chickasaws were attacking the French-speaking outposts in the Illinois country.

While camped in Powell’s Valley and roasting some meat for supper, the Boones were accosted by a party of six or eight Indians. At first the exchange was friendly, and then the Indians offered to trade their
muskets for the fine rifles Daniel and Squire carried. The brothers refused, and their rifles and all their furs were seized. One brave demanded Squire’s shot pouch, and when it was not handed over quickly, he grabbed the strap.

It is not clear why Boone was so reluctant to comply with the Indian demands on this occasion. Perhaps he realized this was his last chance to return to the Yadkin with a hoard of furs, after two years in the wilderness. It is possible Squire became angry and resistant and Daniel was caught between his brother and the Indians. On only one other occasion, years later, would he lose his temper when he was surprised by Indians as he was about to eat after a long fast. Perhaps in Powell’s Valley in 1771 he was aggravated by hunger. Both Boones got in scuffles with the Indians, and a large warrior raised his tomahawk and ordered them to flee, which they did. At the end of two years of wandering Boone may have been exhausted, impatient to get home. Hiding in the brush a few hundred yards away, they watched the Indians depart. Then they ran to the nearest settlement, probably a few miles away on the Clinch River, to get help. Having lost their rifles, furs, and horses, they were extremely vulnerable.

A party was formed in the settlement
and followed the Indians, but apparently the group was in a bad mood. One member shot a deer that wandered across their path, and the others got angry because he had given away their presence. The ensuing argument caused so much ill feeling that the band gave up the pursuit and decided to return to the settlement. Later Boone learned that the Indians had been waiting for them in an ambush and it was fortunate they all turned back when they did.

As they were returning to their homes, some members of the posse killed two Indians near a remote cabin and divided their belongings among the group. Later they learned some of the war party that had robbed the Boones were drowned crossing a river in flood. It was a week of mindless brutality and loss, and a sad ending to the two most significant years of Boone’s life.