Boone: A Biography (31 page)

To say the least, it was a time of uncertainty. The outcome of North Carolina and Virginia’s case against the Transylvania Company was not known yet. The rebellion against the Crown was spreading and gathering momentum. The settlers were struggling to survive a long, wet, and cold winter in conditions that were hard even in clement weather. Boone was concentrating on trapping beaver and hunting for subsistence, as troubles and adversities mounted. Against all the odds, more than nine hundred claims had been entered in the land office at Boonesborough. But many of the more than half-million acres purchased had not been surveyed. Two hundred thirty acres of corn had been raised the first summer at Boonesborough. An orchard of five hundred trees had been set out. There was a substantial number of livestock and poultry.

The account books of the Transylvania Company
show that lead was sold to the settlers for 16 2/3 cents a pound and gunpowder cost $2.66 a pound. Hunters and laborers were paid as much as 50 cents a day. Both British pounds and Virginia dollars were in circulation in
Kentucky, and sometimes even Spanish money was used. Few of the accounts are marked paid in any currency.

B
OONE HAD
filed his claim for the thousand acres on Tate’s Creek southwest of Boonesborough. To make the purchase valid, he had to build a cabin or shelter on the land and raise a crop of corn within a year of the claim. There is no record that he did either. But Boone had better luck helping others than helping himself. When he and Thomas Hart were hunting that winter, Hart stepped off and claimed an acreage on Jeptha Creek. To mark the site, Hart carved his initials on a beech tree.
Twenty years later when the ownership
of the land was in dispute, Boone led the attorneys back to the tree and showed them the carved initials, winning the case for Hart.

Having survived the long 1775–76 winter in the rough and dirty conditions of frontier cabins, the settlers who had stayed at Boones-borough emerged into the spring sun and began planting crops for a second year. Their numbers had dwindled through desertion, but those who remained had the confidence of their hard work and persistence. They had taken the risks and they had gotten through the winter. Now they could thin their blood with fresh poke greens boiled with fat, and also creesie greens, or wild mustard, that grew along the creeks. And some sought out branch clay to chew and swallow to tone their systems and replenish minerals. Clay pure as cream could be found in pockets along the banks of streams. Eating a little branch clay was a common spring ritual for many people on the frontier, both black and white. Soon it would be planting time, and the women were especially intent on making gardens. “
They had brought out a stock of seeds
from the old settlements and went out every bright day to plant them.”

In the spring of 1776, after Daniel and Squire Boone had returned from a surveying expedition that had taken them as far as the Falls of the Ohio, heavy rains began. It was the kind of season when it seems the rain cannot stop. Day after day the Kentucky River continued to
rise and the water came almost to the cabin doors at Boonesborough. For much of its length the Kentucky River runs between steep bluffs in a gorge cut through the millennia, but Boonesborough was built on a level plain that flooded easily. It looked as though the dwellings might be swamped; luckily the water stopped just at the cabin thresholds and finally began to recede. Word arrived from Harrodsburg that a Mrs. Hugh Wilson there had given birth to the first white child born in Kentucky. Of a half-dozen married women at Boonesborough, none had yet given birth.

T
ROUBLES
continued to build and compound for the Transylvania Company. The settlers at Harrodsburg and Logan’s Station and other sites, who had acted as though partly resigned to the ownership of the Transylvania Company the year before, were newly angered by news that quitrents and land prices were to be doubled. For every hundred acres the annual quitrent would be two shillings from now on. Those already in Kentucky protested that they would not pay more than they had agreed to the year before. Harrod and others had their eye on land farther west along the Ohio River, and they accused the Transylvania Company of attempting to preempt those thousands of choice acres before anyone else had a chance to survey and claim them.

Col. John Williams, the agent for the Transylvania Company, tried to placate these protesters by halting large land grants in the West for the time being. Only parcels of a thousand acres or less would be sold near the Falls, where a future town was to be laid out. The Transylvania Company opened an office at Harrodsburg as more and more settlers arrived. Benjamin Logan and his family returned to St. Asaph’s, now called Logan’s Station. Levi Todd returned to Kentucky with a number of the Bryan family, Rebecca’s relatives, coming from the Yadkin.

At some point in the spring of 1776, in April or May, Boone apparently journeyed all the way to Williamsburg for a supply of gun powder. On June 8 Col. William Fleming wrote to Colonel Preston, “
This forenoon boon delivered 700 lbs.
Powder. 100 of which is ordered for the
Point [Pleasant]. 100 is allotted for your county to the use of the committee. In consequence of an order from the Committee of Safety, I have ordered four men to escort the wagon.” It is thought Boone was accompanied by some of the Callaway family to Kentucky on this same trip. To reach Kentucky the powder had to be taken out of the wagon and loaded onto packhorses.

Hundreds came into Kentucky that spring by floating or paddling down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh. Ignoring the Transylvania Company, many would stake claims in the lush meadows and luxuriant forests, build rude shelters and plant corn, nominally fulfilling the obligations of settlement, then return east to sell their claims. Greedy as these small speculators, called “cabiners,” may have seemed, they were doing on a small scale essentially the same thing the larger entities such as the Transylvania Company were doing. Kentucky was a great “speck,” as they liked to say, an Eden of cheap land up for the grabbing, even where previous claims had been made. “
What a Buzzel is amongst
People about Kantuck,” a man in Virginia had commented the year before. The “buzzel” had continued to build.

“
The face of the country at that time
was beautiful beyond conception,” Lyman Draper would write. “Nearly one half of it was covered with cane, while between the canebrakes were frequently fine open grounds, as if . . . intended by nature for cultivation. Nor was the country destitute of the finest timber—which was happily distributed for the wants of men. The soil was extremely fertile, producing in its untamed state amazing quantities of weeds of various kinds, wild grass, rye and clover. The dews were very heavy, which rendered the nights cool and refreshing. The land then appeared more level than when subsequently cleared . . . as the thickness of the growth prevented the early explorers from discovering the diversities of the surface.”

Recent studies have concluded that
there were more forests than meadows
in the Bluegrass region previous to settlement. Many of those who saw the region at this time could not restrain themselves from extravagant praise of the soil. “
When you take it between your fingers
you cannot perceive any more grit than in butter,” Edward Harris would write a little later, going on to say the dirt was “black as the bottom of your dung heaps.” It seemed not to occur to those coming into this region that these resources could ever be exhausted. It was assumed by many that Kentucky would never be heavily populated because of the scarcity of fresh springs. This seems odd in hindsight, as if they had never thought of digging wells. Perhaps the limestone bedrock was too difficult to cut through without modern drilling and cutting equipment.

Kentucky inspired passion and awe in most who came there. The settler Nathan Reid, John Floyd’s surveying assistant, would later say, “
What a country it was
in that day! It would be difficult for the most fertile imagination to draw an exaggerated picture of its then lovely appearance. The soil was black as ink, and light as a bank of ashes. A person passing through the woods might be tracked as easily as through snow.”

“Strange as it may appear,” Reid said, “it is nevertheless true, that amid all the dangers, privations and exposures of our situation, a very considerable portion of our time was spent in real enjoyment. The abundance and variety of the game—the pleasure of hunting—the novelty of the life we led—the dreams we indulged of better days to come, all combined to keep up our spirits . . . We clearly foresaw that it would not be long before these lands would be justly appreciated, and sought after by thousands. Then we should be rich as we cared to be. These golden visions of the future, however, so far as I was concerned, were never realized.”

As more and more of the small speculators poured into Kentucky, along with the commercial hunters and trappers, spies for the British and agents provocateurs such as the French Canadian Louis Lorimier from Montreal, worked for the British to stir up the Indians against the settlers. In the cabins and forts, talk was constant about the sightings and threats from Indians. If someone had seen a track or broken twig, or heard a strange noise, they imagined a war party was lurking
in the thickets. Writing in the
North American Review
seventy years later, a writer named Perkins described Boone as sitting silent while all the talk and rumors and speculations were passed around the room. His hands never idle, he kept busy mending his leggings or molding rifle balls until it was almost dark, then he would take his rifle and slip out into the forest. “
‘And now,’
said the loiterers by the smoldering logs, ‘we shall know something sure, for old Daniel’s on the track.’” Before morning Boone would return to the cabin silent as a shadow and tell them what was, or was not, in the forest around them.

In April 1776 a surveyor named Willis Lee was killed by Mingoes near the future site of Frankfort. Mingoes also captured the twin sons of Andrew McConnell of Leestown and took them back to a Shawnee town in Ohio. But the Indian agent Col. George Morgan and Chief Cornstalk were able to arrange their release. This kidnapping spread such fear throughout Kentucky that more settlers left. The life in the stations was so dangerous that when someone died of natural causes, not killed by Indians, a woman there later recalled it seemed almost an occasion for rejoicing. “
When a young man was taken sick
and died, after the usual manner of nature, she and the rest of the women sat up all night, gazing on him as an object of beauty.”

The settlers in Kentucky were so eager for new arrivals to swell their numbers that many rode out on the trail to welcome those coming to the forts and stations. Simon Kenton aided many who came by the Ohio River, giving them directions and advice and supplies. He even built a blockhouse near the Ohio to welcome immigrants. James Estill, who lived first at Boonesborough and then moved to his own station just south of future Richmond, actually killed game and left it along the trails for those just coming into the country.
He would ride out to meet
those arriving and tell them where to find the meat. Those in Kentucky knew that without more settlers they could not hold out against a combined assault from Indians and the British.

On July 7, 1776, a hunter named Cooper was killed by a party of
Shawnees on the Licking River. On July 14 another man was killed on the Licking and a number of hunters and surveyors were reported missing. The threat of an Indian war hung so heavily over the region that
Col. William Russell of the Clinch
advised that the settlements in Kentucky be evacuated. John Floyd wrote to Col. William Preston on July 21, 1776, that many people had gone missing, and
new signs of Indians were seen every day
.

Even as rumors were growing of imminent Indian attacks, the angry petitioners of Harrodsburg, including James Harrod, Abraham Hite Jr., and more than eighty others, who had from the beginning resisted the Transylvania Company, were lobbying the government of Virginia to recognize their claims and complaints against Henderson.
Their resentment was directed
not only at the Transylvania Company but also against the surveys done at the direction of former colonial governor Dunmore. Meanwhile Henderson and his partners were lobbying the legislature in Williamsburg for title to the lands they had purchased from the Cherokees. James Hogg tried every means, including bribery, to further the interests of the Transylvania Company. As George Morgan Chinn tells it, “
When Hogg offered Governor Patrick Henry
a vast acreage of prime land in Transylvania in return for his support, Henry practically ‘threw him out’ of the office.” By then Henry did not need the Transylvania Company.

One of the leaders of the Harrodsburg Revolt was George Rogers Clark, who got himself elected as a representative to the Virginia legislature. Clark understood that this quarrel among the settlements was an opportunity for the state of Virginia, for the American Revolution, and for himself. With Henderson out of the way, Clark could assume leadership of the region and further the Revolution on the western frontier.

On June 24, 1776, the Virginia Convention
ruled that no private person or company could sell lands, thereby invalidating the Transylvania Company, but stated that the claims of individual settlers would
be considered later by an official commission. This would prove to be the death knell for Henderson’s dream of an empire across the mountains, but he would continue his petitioning and eventually be awarded four hundred thousand acres in Kentucky and Tennessee. His scout and organizer, Daniel Boone, would end up with nothing.
In November 1778 the Virginia legislature
officially declared the Transylvania Company’s claims null and void.

O
N
J
ULY
14, 1776, one of the legendary events in Boone’s long career occurred. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon at Boonesborough. There were no church services at the settlement, but earlier that day someone had read from the scriptures to an assembled group, and when “the customary Bible reading was over” Boone had lain down in his cabin to rest.