Boone: A Biography (57 page)

Wayne assembled a group of volunteers in Pittsburgh and moved them down the Ohio River. Then in the Cincinnati area he recruited more men and for a year trained them in Indian fighting at forts along the Miami River. Wayne and his little army marched north in 1794 to confront the Shawnees and Miamis in the Maumee region and defeat them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The next year the Shawnees and Miamis signed the treaty of Greenville with the United States, giving up their claims to much of the region north of the Ohio, ending the worst of the Indian raids across the Ohio. The Shawnees chose to move west, many going all the way to the Missouri.

Whether Boone left the Kanawha area to get farther from Indian raids or not, he and Rebecca and Nathan returned to Kentucky in 1794 or 1795. He left a very good impression of himself among his neighbors in the Kanawha region. Writing a century later, a resident and descendant of pioneers in the area, J. P. Hale, said that Boone was not remembered sufficiently “
for his qualities and experience as a counselor
, commander, and legislator, in which fields, notwithstanding his rare modesty and lack of self-asserting, he was appreciated and put forward by his contemporaries.” Hale went on to write, in his short biography of Boone, that the old frontiersman hardly seemed aware of the heroic deeds he had done “
but seemed to be driven
on, irresistibly, by that deep seated instinct for adventure which nature had implanted in him, and whose only gratification could be found among the wilds of the frontier.”

One thing that may have brought Boone back to Kentucky was the bear hunting on the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. Each winter Daniel and Rebecca and one or two of their sons returned there to kill bears, collect bearskins, smoke bear bacon, and render bear flesh into oil. A man named William Champ later said he encountered Boone and his wife and two daughters with their husbands on the Big Sandy living
in half-face camps, where they “
ate their meals from a common rough tray
, very much like a Sap trough, placed on a bench instead of a table, each using as needed a butcher knife to cut meat, & using forks made of cane, with tines or prongs, & and having only bread to eat with the meat.” Bears were so abundant that Boone killed 155 in one season, and he killed one monster bear that weighed between five hundred and six hundred pounds. A bearskin was worth about two dollars, but the meat of each animal was worth more than twice that. Boone’s arthritis was so bad at times that Rebecca had to carry his rifle for him, but he killed record numbers of bears all the same. And since she was known as an excellent shot, Rebecca very likely killed her share of the bruins also.

One of the creeks where they camped was named Greasy Creek because they rendered bear fat there, enough to fill several barrels. Bear grease could be sold for a dollar a gallon.
One bear might yield twenty gallons
of oil. Boone bragged that he had once killed eleven bears before breakfast. With his commercial hunting conducted on such a scale, it is hard to imagine how Boone thought the game population could be sustained. The last buffalo in the Bluegrass had been killed around 1790. This is still one of the paradoxes of Boone’s life and his character. Because he had been a professional hunter most of his life, the paradox was probably not as clear to Boone as it is to us in hindsight. After all, he did not know in 1795 that the buffalo would disappear from the prairie even farther west, that the beaver would retreat to the most remote valleys of the western mountains, and that passenger pigeons, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and Carolina parakeets would become apparently extinct. Whatever may have passed through his mind, he needed to recoup his fortunes a little, and the bears were still there, in the Big Sandy country, by the hundreds if not the thousands. And besides, if he didn’t kill them, somebody else would.

It seems that by the summer of 1795 the Boones had moved back to Kentucky, settling in a cabin on property owned by Daniel
Morgan Boone on Brushy Fork of Hinkston Creek near the Blue Licks, near where Boone was captured by the Shawnees in 1778. Boone and Nathan cleared land and planted several acres of crops. The place on Brushy Creek was safer from Indian raids than the towns along the Ohio, but the game had been depleted in the region, the deer almost entirely gone. In winter the Boones still hunted bears over the mountains on the Big Sandy, but around their cabin there was little game, not even turkeys.
The legend is that Daniel Boone
was reduced to eating mutton! Of course someone really poor would have had to eat mush or live on grits and beans. But for a great hunter, eating mutton was a sign of reduced circumstances.

The three or four years spent on Brushy Creek were hard by any standards. Boone’s land was mostly gone, contested, or under litigation. Because of his contested surveys, he was being sued for fraud, even by the families of his old friends from the Transylvania Company, Thomas and Nathaniel Hart. It seemed he would never hear the last of the land business. The opinion of many angry landowners in Kentucky was that Boone had cheated them. Some, including young Henry Clay, who had married into the Hart family, sued him.

According to Stephen Aron, “
In 1797, the surveyor general of Kentucky
reported to the legislature that while grants for approximately twenty-four million acres had been issued, the state contained only half that much acreage.” The mess of land disputes extended far beyond Boone, of course. He was only the most famous of those enmeshed in the litigation. Prominent men such as William Fleming, who had served as a Virginia land commissioner in 1779–80, lost even more than Boone in the Kentucky land confusion.

Searching for a new livelihood, Boone heard that Kentucky was going to rebuild the Wilderness Road as a road for wagons and carriages. It was still called Boone’s Trace by many. It occurred to him that maybe he could get the contract for widening and improving Boone’s Trace. With no other prospects in sight, Boone took pen in weathered
hand February 11, 1796, and wrote to his former associate Isaac Shelby, now governor of the new state of Kentucky.

Sir–After my best Respts to your Excelancy
and family I wish to inform you that I have sum intention of undertaking this New Rode that is to be cut through the Wilderness and I think my Self intitled to the ofer of the Bisness as I first Marked out that Rode in March 1775 and Never rec’d anything for my trubel and Sepose I am no Statesman I am a Woodsman and think My Self as Capable of Marking and Cutting that Rode, as any other man Sir if you think with Me I would thank you to wright me a Line by the post the first oportuneaty and he will lodge it at Mr. John Milers on Hinkston fork as I wish to know Wheer and when it is to be Latt So I may attend at the time I am Deer Sir

Your very omble servent Daniel Boone

It must have cost Daniel Boone a lot to write that letter to his young former associate. Boone never was one to put on airs, but it was almost certainly painful to ask for the contract and remind the governor that he had hacked out the first Wilderness Road. Implicit in the letter is his admission of need, never an easy thing for someone of Boone’s independence and pride. He must have thought a long time before finally sending the letter. But the request did him no good. As far as we can tell, Governor Shelby did not even bother to answer his former friend, the old frontiersman down on his luck. The letter was preserved with his other papers but never given a response. The silence, and the award of the contract to someone else, did nothing to make Boone feel at home in Kentucky.

Isaac Shelby was one of the outstanding officers of the American Revolution in the South and West. When only thirty, he had led his militia to victories at Thicketty Fort, Musgrove’s Mill, and Kings Mountain in South Carolina. More than anyone, he was the architect of the victory over Patrick Ferguson in the latter battle. He had
surveyed land in Kentucky in 1775 and was an outstanding leader and politician. He would later be instrumental in the victory over the British at the battle of the Thames in Canada in 1813. As the first governor of Kentucky, he was no doubt overwhelmed by requests for favors, petitions. Political pressures were probably brought to bear for some petitioners. Besides, Boone’s probity had been questioned, and his reputation as a surveyor was under a cloud. He had failed and was living in a borrowed cabin. He was old, and Shelby had likely heard of Boone’s failure as a commissary for the Virginia militia. And the old scout had no experience at building roads other than chopping out rough trails for packhorses. True, he had built forts and bridges, cabins, boats, rafts, gunstocks, and every kind of backwoods furniture. And he had surveyed a road from the Yadkin to Salisbury in the 1750s. But that was long ago. Shelby acted as almost any executive would have under the circumstances. James Knox and Joseph Crockett were commissioned to rebuild Boone’s Trace. But even the route rebuilt by Knox and Crockett in the 1790s was little more than a trail for pack animals “
until 1818, when definite legislative steps were taken
to widen the roadway and to improve the fords.”

When the Wilderness Road was rebuilt
for wagons, it followed a different route from the one Boone and later Crabtree had followed. History was already replacing and bypassing his most notable work. The old scout and hunter might be celebrated as a hero in literature, because the country needed a hero in its march toward progress and culture and wealth, but the woodsman himself was no longer wanted.

W
HILE LIVING
on Brushy Creek, Boone again returned to surveying. It was a skill in demand, and in spite of all the lawsuits and disputed claims, Boone must have been recognized as a competent surveyor. Neal O. Hammon tells us, “
In 1796 he began surveying again
, and made at least ten more surveys in Madison and Mason Counties.”

One enterprise Daniel and Rebecca pursued with vigor on Brushy Creek was sugar making. When they returned from the bear hunt on the Big Sandy in late winter, the sap was rising in the maple groves. As snow melted on the south slopes, and ice along the creeks began to drip and run, and arbutus bloomed in sheltered spots, they scattered through the woods tapping trees and hanging cups to catch the sweet tears drawn from the roots and trunk and branches. The drops filled cups and the cups filled noggins and buckets. Over a furnace in the woods they boiled the juice until it was syrup, and then until the syrup was sugar. Husband and wife worked day after day extracting and concentrating the sweetness from the trees on the hillsides in late winter, as they had done so many times over the past forty years.

From time to time Boone was summoned to appear at court about an unpaid debt or faulty land claim. For all his fame, that was his main contact with the world at this time: summonses and indictments, threats and duns. The quiet work of sap gathering must have seemed a sweet refuge indeed.

1798–1808

In the late 1790s Boone and his family began to plan a move to the Missouri territory, far to the west. The continuing summonses to court in land disputes, angry clients or former clients, accusations of fraud, certainly encouraged such a move.
A sheriff tried to serve a warrant
for his arrest but found he had already left Brushy Creek. But there were other factors in the Boones’ decision to go west as well. The game was depleted in Kentucky; the buffalo were gone, the beaver and deer were scarce, and elk had disappeared. Even with arthritis and the weakness of age, he still preferred hunting to any other occupation. He needed wilderness and wild animals. It might even be said that he needed Indians. What was a hunt or a wilderness without Indians? What was a forest without the challenge of Native Americans lurking and spying? He was happiest in the Middle Ground with Indians nearby. By 1798 Boone knew quite well that when the Indians left, the game would soon follow. There was no way to have one without the other. A wilderness without Indians was a contradiction in terms. But after the treaty of Greenville in 1795, the Indians were virtually gone from Kentucky and much of Ohio.

“
Nowhere in America has the almost instantaneous
change from uncultivated waste to the elegances of civilization, been so striking,” said a guidebook for immigrants to the west in 1818. The hunters had
been replaced by small farmers who had been replaced by the slave-owning planters. The main crop in the Bluegrass region was hemp, and soon there were many establishments producing rope and sacks and canvas from the hemp. With the prosperity came pretensions to culture. Among other things, it was that pretension to gentility that Boone wanted to escape. “
A hunter’s life is one of constant excitement
,” James B. Finley later wrote. “His wants are but few, and . . . His employment does not lead him to covetousness, and he is always characterized by a genuine hospitality. His hut or cabin is always a sure asylum for the hungry and destitute.” Boone needed a community that believed, as he did, in sharing both abundance and hardship.

The natural pull to the west, always to the west, to the unknown, to the future, was enhanced by the political considerations of the times. The Spanish controlled the territory of Louisiana, that is, the land west of the Mississippi. After the Treaty of San Lorenzo between the United States and Spain in 1795,
the Spanish government embarked on a policy to encourage
Americans to settle in the Missouri region to establish a presence, a kind of buffer, against British incursions down the Mississippi from Canada and, ironically, American incursions from the east.