Boone: A Biography (60 page)

Hunting on the Grand River, Boone and Derry stayed in a cave and accumulated a supply of meat and furs. One morning they rose to discover a large party of Osages had camped close by but hadn’t spotted them. It snowed that day, hiding Boone’s traps and tracks. There was nothing for Boone and Coburn to do but huddle in the cave, building only tiny fires behind cover to cook bits of meat. Finally, after twenty days, the Indians moved on and Boone and Derry were free to go outside. Boone described the ordeal later to John Mason Peck. “
He stated to the writer
, that he had never felt so much anxiety in his life for so long a period, lest they should discover his traps and search out his camp. He was not discovered by the Indians, and when the snow melted away they departed.” But on the same day a trap sprang on Boone’s hand. Unable to open the trap with his other hand he had to stumble back to camp.
Before Derry got the trap open
, Boone’s bloody hand was partly frostbitten.

As syndic of the Femme Osage region, Boone was expected to act as local magistrate or justice of the peace. Among his duties was the
trial of small crimes. Larger cases were sent on to the courts in St. Charles or St. Louis. Under the Spanish system a syndic was a kind of
patrón
and when Louisiana was passed to the French in 1800 nothing much changed. Delassus remained in charge of Missouri as lieutenant governor.

Boone held his court under an elm near Daniel Morgan’s cabin called the Judgement Tree or the Justice Tree. The court under the elm echoes the Divine Elm of Boonesborough, where Richard Henderson held the first convention of Kentucky in May of 1775. As syndic, Boone was sheriff, judge, and jury all wrapped up in one. Nathan Boone later said his father ruled “
more by
equity
than by law.” Most of the petty criminal cases Boone heard were like that of the man who had stolen a hog. Given the choice of being sent for trial in St. Charles or
whipped
and sent home, most offenders chose the lash. When he returned home the hog thief was asked how his hearing went. “Whipped
and cleared
,” was his proud answer. Sometimes Boone laid on the whip himself, as when an offender cursed him and said if Boone were not an old man he would beat him up. “
Let not my gray hairs
stand in the way,” Boone shouted and wielded the lash with his own hand. In one case one neighbor had bitten off the ear of another in a fight. “
A Certain James Meek & the bearer
hereof Bery Vaigrant had some difference which Came to blows and in the scuffle the said James Meek bit a piece of Bery Vaigrants left Ear.” In frontier fighting, eyes were gouged out and noses or ears bitten off or pulled out by the roots.

Neighbors who witnessed Boone holding court under the Justice Tree said they had never seen him act with more relish and sense of purpose. After a lifetime of being summoned to court for unpaid debts and disputed boundaries, it was gratifying to sit or stand behind the bench rather than in front of it.
People who knew Boone at this time
said they had never known him to take as much satisfaction in any appointment as he did in the office of syndic. It was a role he rehearsed and performed with particular appreciation.

A story that shows Boone had not lost his generosity and compassion, whatever capacity he served in, concerns a cow taken from a widow in lieu of an unpaid debt. Since the unpaid debt was a fact, Boone had no choice but to let the aggressive lender keep the cow. “
Take it and go,” Boone said
, “but never look an honest man in the face again.” And then Boone told the widow he would give her a better cow, and he proved as good as his word.

When Louisiana passed to American control in 1804, Delassus recommended Boone to his successor. “
Mr. Boone, a respectable old man
, just and impartial, he has already since I appointed him offered his resignation owing to his infirmities—Believing I know his probity I have induced him to remain, in view of my confidence in him for the public good,” the governor wrote.

Certainly the most difficult case Boone had to deal with concerned the killing of his son-in-law Will Hays by Hays’s son-in-law James Davis. Hays was a man of short temper who got in fights and beat his wife, Susannah, now dead, repeatedly when he was drinking. The once lively Susannah had often carried bruises from his abuse. “
Hays used to whip aunt fearfully
,” Evira L. Coshow told Draper. On more than one occasion Boone had beaten Hays to punish him for his domestic violence. Once Boone’s sons had tied Hays to a tree for Boone to whip, after he had yet again beaten Susannah. After Susannah’s death in 1800, Hays’s behavior grew even worse. He drank more and quarreled and fought and threatened. “
Hays was a brave man and always foremost
, but he was bad tempered and drank to excess,” Nathan told Draper.

In his cups Hays got into a quarrel with James Davis, who was married to Hays’s daughter Jemima. Hays told Davis that if he ever came to his house again he would kill him. But Davis, assuming that when Hays sobered up he would forget the threat, stopped by Hays’s house a short time later in December 1804 while looking for his horse. Hays ordered him inside, but Davis said no, he had to find his horse and ride
into town where he was serving on the grand jury. But Hays had not forgotten his anger or his threat. “
Hays said if he would not come in
he would make him and went to get his rifle,” Abner Bryan told Draper. Cursing Davis, Hays ran into his cabin and Davis dashed to the safety of a tree. With his rifle cocked Hays pursued Davis, yelling that all the trees in the woods could not protect him. As Hays got closer, Davis, with his own rifle cocked, stepped out from behind the tree and shot Hays in the chest. Hays died a few hours later.

As syndic, Boone was required to arrest James Davis and escort him to the jail in St. Charles. There he arranged a three-thousand-dollar bond for Davis and later, during the trial, served as a character witness for the defendant. Eventually Davis was acquitted. Hays’s son Daniel Boone Hays had witnessed the shooting and told Boone that Davis fired in self-defense.

The administrators of Louisiana, under Spanish and French rule, treated Boone and the other American settlers with flexibility and tolerance. Though every immigrant was required by law to profess the Roman Catholic faith, this restriction was usually satisfied with a general question such as, “Do you believe in God?” which Baptists and Methodists could easily answer in the affirmative. “
An affirmative answer being given
to these and sundry other questions of a general nature, the declaration, ‘
Un bon Catholique
,’ would close the ceremony, and confirm the privilege of an adopted citizen.” Lieutenant Governor Delassus even permitted evangelists to enter the territory and conduct revivals, and when he knew they were ready to leave he would threaten them and order them out of the territory. Then they were free to return and evangelize again, and again when they were ready to leave he would expel them. One preacher who returned repeatedly was Rev. John Clark, who at the end of each tour was threatened with jail and a fine. “
This was repeated so often
, as to furnish a pleasant joke with the preacher and his friends.” It was a liberal arrangement, similar to the one he made with Boone about his land grant.

B
OONE’S FIRST
years in Missouri were especially satisfying. Rebecca and Daniel lived as they had for most of their lives. While staying in Daniel Morgan’s cabin, they went out to a sugar camp in their first year in Missouri in the early spring. Nathan told Draper, “
At sugar-making time in February
my father and mother went to my place and built a half-faced camp (cabins with three sides and the front open) where they made three or four hundred pounds of sugar. It took them several weeks.”

All his life Boone’s troubles appeared to come in waves. The good periods seemed to happen when he started out in the wilderness and experienced an idyll of hunting and trapping and exploration of new territory, digging ginseng, making maple syrup, boiling salt, clearing some land. But then misfortune caught up with him and his troubles accumulated and compounded.

In the spring of 1803 Boone heard that his daughter Levina had died back in Kentucky at the age of thirty-six, leaving eight children. Her husband, Joseph Scholl, who had been with Boone at the Battle of the Blue Licks, brought the children to Missouri and settled there. Boone’s daughter Rebecca took consumption and died in 1805 in the cabin on Brushy Creek, and soon after that her husband, Philip Goe, known as a heavy drinker, also died. Daniel Morgan Boone returned to Kentucky and brought five of Rebecca’s seven children to Missouri.

That life in the Missouri wilderness was much harder on women than on men goes almost without saying. Besides the cold, the heat, the wet, the dirt, the diet of cornmeal and meat, they lacked medicine and medical attention. Most women had child after child. Daniel Morgan’s young wife, Sara, bore twelve children. Nathan Boone’s wife, Olive Van Bibber Boone, the beauty of the Little Sandy, married at the age of sixteen and taken west, once with a slave companion built a chimney and added a floor to their cabin while Nathan was away on a hunt. She was pregnant at the time. Nathan himself would later brag, “
With stones for the fireplace, sticks for the
chimney, and mud for mortar these lone women erected a chimney, the draft of which proved decidedly the best
of any on the farm.” Olive went on to have fourteen children. Besides the bearing and rearing of children, the cooking and housework, these women did the outdoor work also. When the men were away hunting, the women, along with the children, did all the work.

After injuring his hand in the beaver trap, Boone was not able to go on extended hunts for a while. He and Rebecca moved to a cabin farther up Femme Osage Creek, leaving Daniel Morgan’s cabin to his rapidly growing family. At the new location Boone could help with sugar making and shoot turkeys and other game from the yard. Each February Rebecca and Daniel joined Jemima and Flanders Callaway twenty miles farther up the Missouri to make maple sugar near the Callaway property at the mouth of Charette Creek. It is likely that near the age of seventy Boone lacked the strength for clearing land and building a cabin, and since neither was required immediately, he put off the effort and nursed his arthritis and hunted when he could.

When Spain gave the Louisiana territory back to France in 1800, many Americans were alarmed. All the land from New Orleans to Canada, from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, was now in the hands of the aggressive, ambitious Napoleon. The port of New Orleans and the Mississippi were essential to the American settlements in the West. By 1802 it seemed crucial to American interests to purchase New Orleans and at least part of Louisiana.

President Jefferson instructed the American minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, to make an offer to the French, and he appointed James Monroe to travel to Paris to lead the negotiations. A revolt in Haiti had dimmed Napoleon’s hopes for an empire in the New World, and with war with Britain looming, France needed money and feared it could not hold Louisiana in any case against a British invasion. The timing was good for the Americans. On April 29, 1803, Monroe and the American delegation agreed to pay France fifteen million dollars for the whole territory. Almost all Americans approved the acquisition except some Federalists, mostly in New England. The Americans took possession of New Orleans, the capital, on December 20, 1803.
The purchase doubled the area of the United States, and the tide of immigrants to the West began to surge.

As far back as his days as secretary of state under Washington, Jefferson had planned an exploration of the West for scientific, commercial, and political purposes. As soon as the purchase became a fact he chose Meriwether Lewis, his secretary, to lead such an expedition. Lewis selected William Clark, younger brother of George Rogers Clark, as co-commander. Their brief was to explore westward to the Rockies and find a route to the Pacific. They were charged with making maps, keeping journals, gathering specimens of wildlife, making diplomatic contact with the Indians, looking out for America’s future interests. They set out up the Missouri in May 1804, passing near Boone’s residence. It is not clear whether they visited Boone on their way or not.

W
HEN
M
ISSOURI
became a territory of the United States in late 1803, the American government reassured the settlers in the region that their legitimate claims would be recognized and the transition would be smooth to the new political and administrative system.

As more white settlers, as well as displaced eastern Indians such as the Shawnees, moved into Missouri and hunters ranged farther west into the hunting ground of the Osages and other regional tribes, the Missouri Indians grew angrier and more aggressive. It was the old story. At first a few new hunters appear and they seem no real threat to the Natives. The white and immigrant Indian hunters are friendly; there is even a friendly rivalry. Warriors rough up a few and take their traps and furs, but the hunters keep coming. They multiply and multiply again. The buffalo and elk, bear and beaver, begin to thin out. The rights to a region, a whole way of life, become threatened.

On a long hunt to the Kansa River in December 1804, Nathan Boone and Matthias Van Bibber encountered a band of Osages, were ordered to get out of their country and were stripped of their horses and furs. No sooner had the Osages left than a band of Kansa Indians
appeared. Angry that the Osages had beaten them to the furs and horses, they stripped Nathan and Matthias, known as Tice, of their clothes and supplies but left them one cheap gun and a meager supply of powder and lead. It was the middle of a bitter winter and they had no coats.

In an epic journey that became part of the folklore of the region, Nathan and Tice walked down the Missouri Valley through snow and extreme cold. Only their urging of each other on kept them going, as frostbite and starvation weakened and slowed them. They were saved when Nathan shot a panther and they feasted on the raw flesh and wrapped themselves in the skin. “
We fastened our fur vests with strings
, and though our arms were still exposed, they added vastly to our comfort,” Nathan told Draper. A hundred miles from home they finally met a hunting party that included one of Jemima Callaway’s sons, and the two men were carried home on litters, reaching there on Christmas Eve. Tice Van Bibber later died of the effects of this exposure. Nathan spent months recovering. Whatever the horror Olive felt seeing her young husband brought home on a litter, she later joked about the incident, saying it was the first Christmas Nathan had spent at home since their marriage, “
and I had to thank the Indians for that
.”