Boone: A Biography (56 page)

Boone shipped most of the furs and hides and ginseng he accumulated to a merchant in Maryland named Vanlear. “
1790 Apl. 27 Van Lears, merchtr., write
from Williamsport, Md. ‘Every prospect of deerskins and fur commanding a good price’ . . . ‘2 Barrells Ginseng.’” The hunting was done by his sons Daniel Morgan and Jesse, and records show that though Boone sent many barrels of ginseng and bales of beaver skins,
he never got out of debt to Vanlear
, because the merchant sent him trade goods in return. No matter where he lived, or the volume of business he conducted, Boone was hounded by debt. It was the story of his Yadkin years, and the Kentucky years, and it continued to be the story of his Point Pleasant years. Boone was a gambler, always betting that his luck would change. He lived with his passions and enthusiasms, hopeful that debts would take care of themselves as he moved on to each new enterprise.

“
The year 1790 marks the end of an era
—the heroic age of the pioneers of the Old Southwest,” wrote Archibald Henderson in 1920. If Boone’s most heroic actions were in the past, there were still considerable challenges to face, as Indians attacked the settlements along the Ohio again and again. And Boone’s reputation for heroic action continued to grow. In October 1790 the
European Magazine
, published in London, featured an article titled “
Adventures of Colonel Daniel
Boone, one of the original Settlers of Kentucky; containing the Wars with the Indians on the Ohio, from 1769 to the Year 1784, &c. written by Himself.” It was yet another reprinting of a version of Filson’s “Adventures.”

At Point Pleasant Boone
even worked from time to time at his old profession
of surveying. But gone were the heady days when he had his own teams with assistants whom he kept supplied with “Old Monongahela.” And no sooner had Boone arrived at Point Pleasant in 1789 than he was commissioned lieutenant colonel of the county militia. There were still Indian raids across the Ohio, and Boone organized the defense when settlers gathered at a local fort. The Shawnees attacked Tackett’s Fort in 1789 and Fort Lee in 1790. But the greatest danger was from small raiding parties that crossed the river and killed settlers in their fields or along woodland trails.

While Boone’s friend John Van Bibber was making maple syrup in a grove on the north bank of the Ohio, his daughter Rachel and son Joseph crossed the river in a canoe intending to join him. A party of Shawnees captured them and killed and scalped the daughter and took his son prisoner. A number of other members of Van Bibber’s extended family were killed in Indian raids. More than once Daniel and his son Daniel Morgan encountered Indians in the woods and had to flee or hide. Several times it was reported that Boone had been killed by Indians, but these stories turned out to be “greatly exaggerated,” as Mark Twain later said of his own reported death.

In 1791 Boone was once more elected a county representative to the Virginia legislature. It was his third stint as a lawmaker, and his election shows the high regard his new neighbors had for him. He took Rebecca and ten-year-old Nathan to Richmond with him for the sessions and served quietly and faithfully with the lawmaking body. Boone was, in fact, in Richmond when Kentucky separated from Virginia and became a state itself in 1792. Later Nathan recalled his visits to Richmond as a boy, and the travel back and forth, as an idyllic time.
Far from the land disputes and debts in Kentucky, Boone had made a new start. He seemed to relish his work with the legislature. Nathan would remember picnics by the James River, and his mother roasting oysters over an open fire. The route to and from Kanawha was over the Midland Trail, and once they stopped in the Shenandoah Valley to visit Boone’s old friend Henry Miller, now a prosperous owner of an ironworks. “
There my father saw among Miller’s cattle
an animal of unusually large horns; he expressed a wish that he had one of them, as it would make a splendid powder horn.” Miller killed the steer and gave a horn to Boone to carve into a powder horn for Nathan. Scraping and carving horns was a favorite pastime for Boone, carving buttons and spoons and powder horns. As he sat by the fire and talked or listened, Boone preferred to keep his hands busy, making something useful. (
This visit to Henry Miller’s farm
likely occurred during Boone’s 1787 term in the legislature, since Miller apparently died in 1790.)

In 1791 Boone seemed ready to make himself useful in other ways. He proposed to the governor of Virginia that he, Boone, act as commissary to the militia forces in the western part of the state. It was the kind of appointment where a crook might make a killing, but an honest man such as Boone could realize at best a modest profit from a huge amount of hardship and effort. Agreeing to supply militias in the backwoods, with Indians lurking along the trails and with floods and snowstorms threatening, and sources of supply hundreds of miles away over mountain paths, was no small undertaking. Likely Boone expected to supply most of the forts along the Ohio and Monongahela with the game he shot himself.

Boone wrote to the governor, “
Sum purson Must Carry out
the armantstion to Red Stone. I would undertake it, on condition I have the a pintment to vitel the company at Kanhowway.” That is, if given the contract to supply the garrison at Kanawha with meat and provisions, he would undertake the dangerous task of carrying powder and lead across the mountains to Red Stone and other forts. He was given the job. It is possible that no one else applied for the honor.

When the legislative session closed just before Christmas, Boone was issued from the state armory four hundred pounds of gunpowder, sixteen hundred pounds of lead, and a keg of rifle flints to be distributed to the forts in the western part of the state. Roads in much of the mountains were little more than trails, so Boone had to distribute more than a ton of supplies by packhorse. With ice storms and snows, floods and Indian threats, it took him until April to reach all the widely separated forts. It is likely the respective officers were not pleased with the months of delay in getting their supplies and ammunition.

Boone discovered he had taken on more than he could manage. Because of his many debts he was unable to purchase on credit sufficient quantities of bacon and flour to supply the militia in his district, and he ran short of provisions. What had seemed an obvious way to make a little money and serve the state and local security turned quickly into a headache if not a nightmare.

Col. George Clendinen of the local militia assumed Boone was bringing lead and powder for the county garrison also, but that had not been Boone’s understanding. Capt. Hugh Caperton of the Point Pleasant militia, who had been a friend of Boone’s, proved impatient and ill tempered. He accused Boone of incompetence and riled Boone into a shouting match. Boone stormed off and would have nothing further to do with Caperton. When Colonel Clendinen came to investigate Captain Caperton’s accusations of Boone’s failure to supply the militia, Boone was not to be found. He had disappeared into the forest, and when he was finally tracked down he would only say, “
Captain Caperton did not do to my likes
.” He would have no more to do with the matter.

For failure to fulfill his contract with the state, Boone could have been court-martialed. But Colonel Clendinen chose to appoint another supplier and not embarrass the old frontiersman further. Caperton must have been a difficult man to work with, for he was soon afterward relieved of his command by court-martial. Once again an attempt to establish a business had blown up in Boone’s face. Boone must have
had nightmares about his lifelong losses. He had lost fortune after fortune in furs to the Indians. He had lost thousands of acres of Kentucky land to contested surveys, incomplete deeds, dishonest speculators, bad management. He had lost fields and houses, sugar groves, forts, and meadows. He had lost two sons and a favorite brother to Indians. He had lost dozens of friends and acquaintances in Indian wars. Now he lost interest in business completely. His failure with the provisioning contract shows he was getting old. At fifty-seven he was beginning to feel the effects of years of exposure and hardship. Even his extraordinary constitution was subject to arthritis and fatigue. His celebrated patience had worn thin.

Within months of the confrontation with Caperton, Boone would close his store at Point Pleasant and move to a cabin sixty miles away on a hill with a commanding view of the Kanawha valley, near the future Charleston. Once again he was a squatter, and he assigned his nephew John Grant his power of attorney to look after his property and affairs in Kentucky. He told Grant and his children to not even bother to contest claims. Lawsuits cost more money and trouble than they were worth. “
Though he had fought as hard
and long for Kentucky as any other person, he would rather be poor than retain an acre of land or a farthing of money so long as claims and debts hung over him,” Nathan later said. Boone was finished with business and legal affairs, and he spent his days the way he liked best, hunting and trapping, wandering the woods on the beautiful hills along the Kanawha.

Luckily there were still beaver in the region. They had mostly been trapped out in Kentucky. But in the mountains of Virginia, in what became West Virginia, there were still dams and colonies along the creeks. Setting traps was easier than hunting. Skins were lighter to carry out of the woods than deer hides or heavy bearskins and hams. And beaver fur was still one of the most valuable products in the woods. Skins and a few traps could be carried by a man approaching sixty with arthritis. Annette Kolodny tells us, “
As Boone grew older and increasingly enfeebled
by rheumatism, moreover, it became common
knowledge that Rebecca accompanied him into the woods, helping her husband to bring down the game, aiming and firing when his knotted fingers could not, and generally proving as valuable a companion as any son or Indian might be.”

At times his rheumatism got so bad he could hardly walk.
It was reported that a hunting companion
named Worth had to carry the old hunter across streams. It must have been humiliating for the famous long hunter to be so helpless in the woods. The arthritis would come and go, depending on the weather and his exertions, but at its worst he was almost crippled. Even afflicted, it was said, Boone
killed more deer than any of his neighbors
because he knew their habits so thoroughly.
He especially enjoyed hunting deer in Teaze’s Valley
, a few miles south of Point Pleasant, where there were so many deer tracks it was impossible to follow one particular deer unless it was bleeding.

A description of Boone given to Draper by one who knew him in this period provides yet another impression of him in late middle age. “
His large head, full chest, square shoulders
, and stout form are still impressed upon my mind. He was (I think) about five feet ten inches in height, and his weight say 175. He was solid in mind as well as in body, never frivolous . . . but was always quiet, meditative, and impressive, unpretentious, kind, and friendly in his manner.” This is an appealing portrait of Boone at the time he had suffered such losses. It diverges in some points from the testimony of his son Nathan, who put his father’s height at five eight, adding that his “
hair was moderately black, eyes blue
, and he had fair skin.”

Boone’s generosity to friends and fellow hunters is attested by those who knew him on the Kanawha.
It was said that in 1792
he trapped with one Robert Safford and caught over a hundred beavers. At the end of the season he presented Safford with his best tomahawk and his favorite trap called Old Isaac. Fame, tragedy, and loss had not taken away his thoughtfulness and kindness. Even the arthritis had not changed his disposition or shaken his poise.

I
T IS NOT
clear exactly when or why Daniel and Rebecca and Nathan left the cabin on the Kanawha and returned to Kentucky. Perhaps they wanted to be closer to their other children and grandchildren living in northern Kentucky. Or maybe Boone was just restless again. It is also possible that the continued Indian raids into Kanawha country encouraged the Boones to move farther away from both the Ohio and the Kanawha rivers.

In 1793 Nathan had been sent to Kentucky to attend a Baptist school near Lexington.
Later he told Draper
it was he who encouraged his parents to return to Kentucky, in part because the interior of Kentucky was safer from Indian attack than the mountains of Virginia. Nathan had many memories of hunting with his father and avoiding encounters with the Shawnees. Once, they were camped in a heavy fog and Boone heard Indians across the river chopping wood. He knew they were making a raft to cross the river. Boone loaded the canoe with the meat they had killed and pushed off, floating downstream in the fog. “
On the way Father put his head over
the canoe and close to the water and said he thought he could catch a glimpse of the Indians. He had looked between the surface of the water and the fog . . . Soon we were beyond harm.” That same night horses were stolen from Daniel Morgan Boone and Matthias Van Bibber.

Though Boone himself was no longer engaged in Indian fighting, hostilities between whites and Indians had by no means ceased in the Ohio country. American forces had suffered two major defeats at the hands of the Shawnees, Miamis, and other tribes while the Boones lived at Point Pleasant and on the Kanawha. Col. Josiah Harmar, who commanded an army of about fifteen hundred, lost many men in a confrontation with a force led by Little Turtle, of the Miamis, and Blue Jacket, of the Shawnees, in the Maumee Valley in 1790. His successor, Gen. Arthur St. Clair, lost almost nine hundred men in a battle with Little Turtle and Blue Jacket on the Wabash, about twenty miles north of later Greenville, Ohio, November 4, 1791. St. Clair’s was the greatest loss of any battle between American forces and Indians on the
western frontier, more than triple that of Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876. In 1793 “Mad” Anthony Wayne was appointed commander of the western forces.