Boone: A Biography (30 page)

From all the testimony we have, Rebecca Bryan Boone must have been one of the hardiest and most resilient and resourceful women in American history. But after the death of the ninth child even she was in need of rest. In a world with only the most rudimentary medicines and medical knowledge, the risk of infection after childbirth was very great. Many women died of childbed fever. Whether Rebecca had fever or not, it took her about six weeks to regain her strength enough to make the move to Kentucky. Annette Kolodny has argued that while
women were sometimes as eager to go into the wilderness as men, their reasons were essentially different.
Men were drawn into the new
territories by visions of paradise, and promise of great wealth, women by a desire for a new home and a fertile, sustaining garden. Whatever their reasons, explicit or implicit, women began to pour into the wilderness by the hundreds and then by the thousands.

On July 18 Henderson had written in his diary, “
Our salt is exhausted
, and the men who went with Col. Boone for that article are not returned. We are informed that Mrs. Boone was not delivered the other day, and therefore do not know when to look for him; and, until he comes, the devil himself can’t drive the others this way.”

On August 10 Henderson packed up and left Boonesborough for North Carolina to plead his case with legislators. He left John Floyd in charge of the land office. Work on the fort had hardly begun, the settlement was without salt, and the land claims were in a tangle too messy to be readily sorted out. It is said that in his final weeks there, without Boone to persuade the men to cooperate, Henderson spent much of his time in his cabin with a bottle of whiskey. He would feel more at home lobbying legislators, and he would not return to Kentucky until the end of the year.

The party that left the Clinch Valley for Kentucky in mid-August 1775 with the large Boone family included seventeen single men and three families. Among them was the hot-tempered Hugh McGary from the Yadkin, Boone’s former hunting companion, married to the widow Mary Ray, reported to be a strong-willed woman who alone knew how to manage McGary’s tantrums. Others who had promised to go were frightened by rumors of Indian attacks and in the end stayed in the settlements. It is presumably this journey over the mountains that George Caleb Bingham later portrayed in his 1850–51 painting
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap
. Deservedly one of the most famous American paintings of the nineteenth century, Bingham’s picture shows a Boone of dignity and resolve. Based on the Chester Harding likeness taken from life in Boone’s old age, the
portrait has Boone wearing a Quaker-style felt hat. He is leading the horse on which Rebecca rides. Her features look very much like those described by family and acquaintances. A long train of packhorses and hunters follows and rugged peaks rear on either side of the path. Flanders Callaway walks beside Boone with calm resolution. A man stops to tie his moccasin, and a handsome dog points at a quail or grouse somewhere in the brush. Far overhead a hawk or eagle soars toward Kentucky. The painting is notable for its time for not showing savage Indians lurking or bears attacking. This Boone is wise and peaceful, determined, organized. Bingham seems to catch the Quaker spirit, the resolve and quiet authority of Boone, much as William Carlos Williams would later portray him in words.

When Boone arrived with his family at Boonesborough on September 8, Henderson had been gone almost a month. Whatever the conditions of the place, and there is evidence the station was something of a shambles, Boone set to work, building a substantial cabin adjoining the fort-to-be with real glass windows and wooden floor. The care with which he built, and the fact that he had brought his family, show that he came for the long haul. The records of the company store attest that he charged many items, including a hundred yards of linen cloth for his wife and daughters.

It was time to begin preparing for the winter, and Boone made the cabin weatherproof. Before he had left for the Clinch in June, he had planted a field of corn and hoed and plowed it before laying it by, that is, leaving it to grow on its own after the stalks were about knee high. A first crop of corn on deadened acres grew explosively in soil black as gunpowder, usually planted in hills, not rows, because of all the roots and stumps and standing deadened tree trunks. A good crop of corn was essential to the settlers. At Boonesborough, as now, corn could be turned into fine whiskey by those with a knack for distilling. Corn would become the basic ingredient of Kentucky’s most popular product, bourbon. Arthur K. Moore has written, “
After clearing, the best land for a time yielded
corn bountifully without exceptional
care—from forty bushels the first year to more than a hundred the third.”
In 1784 Filson would write
that more than a hundred bushels of corn could be grown on an acre each year.

“
My wife and daughter being the first
white women that ever stood on the banks of Kentucke River,” Boone said later. Certainly there would soon be white women at the other settlements such as Harrodsburg and St. Asaph’s. It is unlikely that Boone knew of Mary Ingles, kidnapped from her home at Draper’s Meadows in 1755. She was able to escape later from Big Bone Lick in Kentucky and make her way back to Draper’s Meadows in forty-one days. The daughter of Boone who first lived in Kentucky was Susannah Boone Hays, who had come with the choppers of Boone’s Trace. Among the folklore of her liveliness and naughtiness is a quote passed on to Rev. John Dabney Shane by Nathaniel Hart Jr. “
Every Kentuckian ought to try my gait
,” she is reported to have said, “since I was the first white woman in Kentucky.”

1775–1776

The Transylvania Convention had been scheduled to meet again on September 6, 1775, but Henderson and his partners had left Kentucky to petition the new state governments of Virginia and North Carolina, and the Continental Congress, for recognition of their land purchase. The proprietors of the Transylvania Company did gather in Oxford, North Carolina, and appoint Col. John Williams to take charge of Boonesborough until the next April 12. They authorized him to supervise the surveying and selling of land and the registering of deeds and to claim for the company half of any revenue from gold, silver, lead, copper, or sulfur mines. They also voted “
that a present of two thousand acres
of land be made to Col. Daniel Boone, with the thanks of the Proprietors, for the signal services he has rendered to the Company.” But this may have been the two thousand acres Boone had been promised originally for arranging the purchase from the Cherokees and hacking out Boone’s Trace and building Boonesborough.

For coordinating the meeting with the Cherokees at Sycamore Shoals, organizing the crew of axemen, marking out Boone’s Trace, fighting off Indians and holding the group together until Henderson arrived with his larger party, persuading more settlers to come to Boonesborough and managing much of the business of the settlement, Boone was to be given one-fifth as much land as William Cocke was
awarded for riding across the mountains to Boonesborough. They do not say an
additional
two thousand acres, only the same acreage he had been promised before. Boone had already claimed the tract of one thousand acres on Tate’s Creek. But he would lose that land when the Transylvania Company purchase was declared invalid. The fact is Boone never got any acreage from the Transylvania Company. After their acquisition of twenty million acres from the Cherokees was declared null and void in November 1778, the proprietors were compensated for their losses by grants of two hundred thousand acres in each of the states of Virginia and North Carolina. They were still able to claim and sell off great chunks of prime land, but Daniel Boone never received any more than the first thousand acres from them, and he lost that.

While others such as Michael Stoner
and William Cocke sued Henderson and his partners and their estates for years to win the claims they had been promised, Boone appears to have soon forgotten, or refused to trouble his mind, about his promised land. A long section of the later named Wilderness Road was called Boone’s Trace and the settlement on the river was called Boonesborough. Boone’s name was associated with the Transylvania Company and the settlement of Kentucky more than any other, but in the end he received little more than credit at the company store. By the time the Boonesborough land claims and overlapping surveys were being untangled in 1779–80 by the commission from the state of Virginia, which had made Kentucky its largest county, Boone had moved on to other claims and adventures.

This failure to follow through and nail down the payment for his significant services to Henderson and his partners is an important clue to Boone’s personality. He had a tendency to put off unpleasant matters and turn instead to tasks he relished. He hated legal procedures and business matters and preferred to move on rather than lobby, argue, petition, sue, and wait. He lived by moving on, as his father had before him, and his grandfather George III, who had left Devonshire
for Pennsylvania. Rather than doing paperwork and waiting, paying lawyers and bribing officials, he preferred to keep exploring new territory, finding fresh game and wild country. It was the farther horizon that thrilled him. He was fitted to be a woodsman, a leader of explorations, but hardly a politician, businessman, or land speculator. Boone’s easy abandonment of claims near Boonesborough also shows his sense that the frontier was unlimited. There was always more land ahead, and there would always be more land. Why squabble over a few acres when the whole of Kentucky and Ohio and the regions farther west waited to be explored. Like all men, Boone was a combination of talents, accomplishments, and weaknesses. But his best talents were of a high order, and his genius recognized by virtually all who knew him.

The year 1775 was a complicated and confusing time for all, including those on the frontier, and those attempting to steer the Transylvania Company toward survival and future prosperity. At the meeting in Oxford, North Carolina, Henderson, who had left Boonesborough, and the other proprietors of the company recorded their loyalty to the Crown: “
They flatter themselves that the addition
of a new Colony in so fair and equitable a way, and without any expense to the Crown, will be acceptable to His Most Gracious Majesty, and that Transylvania will soon be worthy of his Royal regard and protection.” But they hedged their bets also, fearing that the rebellion and Continental Congress might win in the end. They added to their proceedings this statement: “
Therefore, the Memorialists hope
and earnestly request, that Transylvania may be added to the number of United Colonies, and that James Hogg, Esq., be received as their delegate, and admitted to a seat in the honorable the Continental Congress.” The proprietors wanted it to be known that they were willing to do business with whoever was in charge. They meant to keep their extensive holdings, no matter what government finally ruled over the region.

The records of the company store at Boonesborough show that in September 1775 Boone drew lead and powder on account for his fall hunting. It was time to lay in a supply of venison and bear meat for
the winter. It was already late in the season to gather deerskins, so he would have to hurry. During the winter he would trap for beaver. Later that month Richard Callaway returned from Virginia with a number of additional families, including William Poage and his wife, and Squire Boone and his wife, Jane, arrived also. There were now enough people to maintain the settlement, and enough hunters to keep them supplied with meat. The Callaways and Poages had driven cattle and hogs, and carried ducks and chickens, over the rough trail. With the addition of Mrs. Callaway, Mrs. Poage, and Jane Boone, there were at least five women in the enclave. And more were arriving at Harrodsburg and other stations as well.

As winter began to close in on the settlers at Boonesborough, Richard Henderson returned from North Carolina with John Williams and about forty other men, including Col. Arthur Campbell from the Holston settlement. On December 21 Henderson called a meeting of the Transylvania Convention, but the weather was bad and few showed up from Harrodsburg, St. Asaph’s, and Boiling Spring. John Floyd was appointed official surveyor for the colony, beating out, because of his experience in Kentucky and his connections to Col. William Preston, Colonel Campbell for the valuable post. Nathaniel Henderson was commissioned as entry taker for the land office. John Floyd immediately appointed six men as deputies and departed for a visit to Virginia.

Reading the minutes of the meeting, one can imagine Boone yawning and struggling to stay awake as the business proceeded hour after hour in good bureaucratic fashion. However, two days later events took a dramatic turn. Two boys named Sanders and McQuinney accompanied Col. Arthur Campbell across the river and then walked in separate directions. The boys were unarmed, but a short time later shots rang out. A party crossed the river to investigate and met Campbell running with only one shoe on. He had been fired on by two Indians, but they had missed. Boone led a search party across the river, but the boys could not be found. Boone saw two moccasin tracks but was unable
to tell who had made them. The following Monday McQuinney was found dead and scalped in a cornfield three miles from Boones-borough. Sanders was never found, and it was assumed he had been taken by the Shawnees north to Ohio. Rumors of Campbell’s cowardice spread among the settlements. Chief Cornstalk, at a meeting at Fort Pitt that fall, had expressed his fear that some unruly Shawnee braves might visit the settlements of Kentucky out of curiosity, if not belligerence. It was thought that the party that killed McQuinney and kidnapped Sanders might be those. Fear swept through the stations, and a number of settlers returned east. But when there were no more attacks, the alarm faded.

At the Treaty of Pittsburgh, signed in October 1775,
many tribes in Ohio
agreed to stay north of the Ohio River and to remain neutral in the Revolutionary conflict. If only it had been that simple. None who signed the treaty, Indian or American, had much control over future events.