Boone: A Biography (27 page)

Boone walked out in front and shot game to feed his company. No doubt he kept an eye out for panthers and bears, and Indians also. Susannah and the slave woman, whose name we don’t know, dressed the game and cooked it. Bear was the preferred meat, for it was sweet and tender. But they relied more on deer, which were more plentiful in the region. It was a season of late snows and freezing rain. When they burned piles of brush, men gathered at the bonfires to warm their hands. The ground along the creeks was greasy mud that sucked on boots and moccasins.

Beyond the Cumberland Gap the trail got even rougher. A few miles farther on, Boone’s crew had to follow the Cumberland River at Pine Mountain Gap, a water gap cut by the river over millions of years, then cross at a ford near Flat Lick.
Although not as famous
as Cumberland Gap, Pine Mountain Gap was equally important for reaching Kentucky. The Warrior’s Path turned due north, but Boone guided his crew northwest toward the Louisa, as the Kentucky River was sometimes called.

Wherever possible, the axemen followed trails already beaten down by migrating herds. With few instruments, probably only a compass, Boone made no attempt at straight lines, but followed openings in the forest, the lay of the land, old fields, animal trails. Winding through mud and fast creeks, canebrakes, and overhanging limbs, the way was a road in name only. But it was a trace, meaning simply it was a route that was marked and could be followed. Leaving the Warrior’s Path north of Flat Lick, Boone then guided his crew northwest along an old hunter’s trail called Skaggs’s Trace to Hazel Patch.
From there he turned due north
through several creek and river valleys toward the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River.

Richard Henderson, who followed with the main body of immigrants, found the trace Boone’s men had made, “
most of it hilly, stony
, slippery, miry or brushy.” It may have been hard to negotiate in places, going this way and that, taking advantage of openings in the wilderness; but people could follow it, at first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, and later by the thousands. Lewis Condict would later write, “
Nothing can exceed the road
for badness in some particular places, the mud being belly deep to our horses, & the banks of the creeks almost insurmountable, from the steepness & slippery nature.” At the place called Hazel Patch, perhaps an old field or fire scald or even a kind of moor, where there was brush but few trees, they knew they were more than halfway to their destination. For Felix Walker and the other choppers, once they crossed the Rockcastle River and hacked their way through several miles of brush and thickets, there was the thrill of a new vista, “
the pleasing and rapturous . . . plains
of Kentucky.” Also Felix Walker said that as March slid toward April and they neared their destination, “Perhaps no Adventurers Since the days of donquick sotte or before ever felt so Cheerful & Ilated in prospect, every heart abounded with Joy & excitement.”

On April 1, 1775, Boone wrote to Richard Henderson one of the earliest of his letters to have been preserved. It is likely that Will Hays
or someone else in the party helped him draft it. The letter, addressed to “Dear Colonel” reads in part:

After my compliments to you, I shall acquaint you of our misfortune. On March the 25th a party of Indians fired on my company about half an hour before day, and killed Mr. Twitty and his Negro, and wounded Mr. Walker very deeply, but I hope he will recover. On March the 28th as we were hunting for provisions, we found Samuel Tate’s son, who gave us an account that the Indians fired on their camp on the 27th day. My brother and I went down and found two men killed and sculped, Thomas Mcdowell and Jeremiah Mcffeeters. I have sent a man down to all the lower companies in order to gather them all to the mouth of Otter Creek.

Boone urged Henderson to come as soon as possible to swell their force, for his men were very uneasy. “Now is the time to flusterate their intentions, and keep the country whilst we are in it,” he said. “If we give way to them now it will ever be the case.” With Henderson was a young man from Virginia named William Calk. He kept a journal of the expedition into Kentucky. “
fryday ye 7th
[of April] this morning is avery hard Snowey morning & we Still continue at camp Being in number about 40 men & Some Neagroes. this Eavening Comes aletter from Capt. [Daniel] Boon at caintuck of the indians doing mischief and Some turns back.”

Boone later described the attack
on March 27 to John Filson, saying they were fired upon by Indians and two men were killed and two wounded. But though taken by surprise they had not been routed. Out of the dark the Indians came swinging their tomahawks. Twitty was wounded; his slave and his bulldog were killed. Felix Walker was wounded but ran with the rest of the party into the woods. As soon as it was clear the attack was over they returned to the camp, but some of the men were so shaken they packed their things and headed back to Virginia and North Carolina. They had assumed the treaty with
the Cherokees would prevent such attacks. Boone and the remaining men threw together a rough structure they called Twitty’s Fort. Twitty himself died after a few days suffering, but Boone helped nurse Felix Walker back to health. “
He attended me as his child
, cured my wounds by the use of medicines from the woods, nursed me with paternal affection until I recovered,” Walker would later write in his account.

It was not certain what tribe of Indians attacked Boone’s company of axemen. In the aftermath various groups accused each other. Ted Franklin Belue in
The Hunters of Kentucky
tells us, “
The Chillicothes accused the Mingoes
; a few blamed Dragging Canoe’s Cherokees; there were rumors the Piquas to the north had dug up the hatchet. No one, he [Capt. Russell] said, was sure who had done the killings.” The attackers may have been a roving band that included members of various tribes. Whoever they were, the momentum of the project broken, the men were confused and afraid. The weather continued bad, and two days after the attack it began to snow. A group had gone out hunting and was attacked and two men killed. When Samuel Tate and the other hunters returned to the main camp and told their story, there was more panic. Only Boone’s calm good sense and manner of authority kept things under control. The slave woman saw someone spying on them from the woods and screamed, and there was panic again, until the intruder proved to be one of the axemen who had fled into the forest after the first attack.

While Felix Walker recovered, and the party recouped its strength and will, Boone and a few other men cut a way down to Otter Creek to the place he and Henderson’s partners had chosen for a settlement on the Louisa or Kentucky River, fifteen miles away. Boone then returned to Twitty’s Fort and rigged up a litter between two horses to carry Walker on to the river. The young man would never forget seeing, as they came in sight of the Great Meadow along the river, hundreds of buffalo, surprised by the appearance of the road makers, heading off from a salt lick and splashing through the stream. “
Such a sight some
of us never saw before,” he wrote later, “nor perhaps may never again.” Walker, and many of the other men, understood they were glimpsing a world just before it was to disappear. And they themselves were among the instruments of history and of its vanishing. “
We felt ourselves as passengers
through a wilderness just arrived at the fields of Elysium, or at the garden where was no forbidden fruit.”

1775

It is easy to forget in the twenty-first century the significance for the English-speaking eastern communities of the settling and holding of Kentucky. The Bluegrass region was valuable in itself, almost beyond description, as a place to claim and build farms and towns and future cities and great wealth. Explorers and speculators and leaders of the time understood that a foothold in Kentucky served as a buffer against the Indians, against the British to the north, and perhaps the Spanish to the west and south. But even more than that, a settled Kentucky promised to open the whole Ohio Valley to settlement. Some Indians seemed to grasp this threat implicitly and fought with tenacity, courage, and imagination the forts and stations, the farmers and surveyors, in the Great Meadow. They seemed to perceive from the first that once their buffalo hunting grounds in the Bluegrass were claimed and cleared, the land north of the Ohio would be next. Other Native leaders such as Cornstalk of the Shawnees were willing, at first, to accommodate the English settlers and did not foresee an inexorable tidal wave of westward expansion.

For the whites nothing could have been more exhilarating, more intoxicating, than the taking and keeping of land across the barrier of mountains. For once that hurdle was finally surpassed, after 150 years of hesitating and yearning in the east, the great river valleys of the
central continent would be within reach. Filson described Kentucky as the “
best tract of land in North-America
, and probably in the world.” The Ohio Valley was more beautiful and contained more land than anyone had mapped or measured. And beyond lay the Illinois country, the fertile Mississippi Valley, stretching almost to Canada in the north and to New Orleans in the south. And beyond the Mississippi, reports were heard of an even bigger river valley, the Missouri, that reached far into a mythical West and whispered rumors of mountains so high their tips sparkled with snow in July.

But whatever lay beyond, in the sunlit pastures and hills of coming years, Kentucky was the key, the first West. Kentucky was the threshold, the beachhead, to who-knew-what playlands and empires of the future, farther west.

O
N THE BANKS
of the Kentucky River, Boone and his men turned their efforts toward building shelters for themselves and those coming behind them at Big Lick, near the mouth of Otter Creek. Henderson’s plan was to construct a substantial fortress, but first they needed cabins to protect them from the elements and animals.

When Henderson received Boone’s letter of April 1, he and his larger group were deeply shaken. After the treaty ceremony at Sycamore Shoals, they had expected no trouble from Indians. They did not understand that even great chiefs such as Attakullakulla and Oconostota were powerless to control the actions of dissident individuals or roving groups of the tribe. A hunting party or group of warriors could do pretty much as it pleased. And the same was true on the side of the whites. Whatever treaties great men such as Henderson or the governor of Virginia might make, settlers and hunters in the wilderness would do virtually whatever they wanted. And the fact that Henderson had signed a treaty with the Cherokees did not mean that Shawnees or Mingoes or Delawares would not attack his expedition. Shawnees were angry because they felt their claims to the hunting grounds of the Great Meadow had been ignored by the whites and
Cherokees and Iroquois at the Treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labor and Lochabar.

Even as Henderson hurried forward toward Cumberland Gap, some of the would-be settlers and hired hands abandoned the venture and turned east. And as the main party labored toward the gap, they encountered several from Boone’s crew and other groups fleeing back to the old settlements. Reports of Indian attacks were sweeping through the region. Among those who had joined Henderson’s party was Abraham Hanks from Virginia, but frightened by reports brought back by fleeing settlers,
Hanks, as recorded by William Calk
on April 13, turned back. Abraham Hanks was the uncle of Nancy Hanks, mother of the sixteenth president, Abe Lincoln.

As they inched along the trace Boone had made, Henderson was surprised to meet more and more men fleeing from Kentucky. Most were not from Boone’s company of axemen but from scattered hunting and surveying parties. By then Kentucky was full of small groups of men hoping to stake a claim in the wilderness, most of them squatters. News of the Indian attacks on Boone’s group sent the weak-hearted hurrying back toward North Carolina and Virginia, or up the Ohio River toward Fort Pitt.
News traveled fast
among the Indians also, and between the traders living among the Indians. Henderson’s greatest fear was that Boone would abandon the post on the river and return with his men before Henderson’s larger group arrived to reinforce the station. He knew that everything depended on Boone’s leadership, character, resourcefulness. If Boone failed, the whole Transylvania Company would fail. “
It was beyond a doubt
,” Henderson wrote later, “that our right, in effect, depended on Boone’s maintaining his ground.”

But the larger party was moving so slowly, and perhaps reluctantly, that Henderson decided someone should ride ahead and assure Boone that reinforcements were on the way. The only man willing to make such a journey was Capt. William Cocke, who had served in the militia during Lord Dunmore’s War. Cocke said he would go if someone else
would ride with him. But there were no takers, even for an inducement of ten thousand acres of Kentucky land. Henderson was desperate, and finally Cocke agreed to go alone. Provided with weapons and supplies, he set off on April 10 and arrived at Boone’s camp on April 14 to find that there had been another attack on April 4 and one more man had been killed. Boone chose Michael Stoner to return to Cumberland Gap and lead Henderson and his party into Kentucky.

John Floyd and Benjamin Logan and his associates from Virginia, who came to Kentucky at almost the same time in a separate party, would take the same path but turn west at Hazel Patch and follow Skaggs’s Trace to a site at Buffalo Spring where they would build St. Asaph’s, later Logan’s Station. Though Logan had entered Kentucky at almost exactly the same time as Henderson, he would be a strong antagonist to the Transylvania Company. John Floyd, ever the diplomat, would prove able to work with both Henderson and Col. William Preston of Fincastle County, Virginia, who held official colonial authority over the region.

The long column of men and packhorses with Henderson finally arrived on the banks of the Kentucky River on April 20 and were saluted with a volley of rifle shots. William Calk wrote in his journal that day: “
Thursday 20th this morning is Clear
& cool. We Start Early & git Down to Caintuck to Boons foart [Boonesborough] about 12 oclock wheare we stop. they Come out to meet us & welcom us in with a voley of guns.”