Boone: A Biography (9 page)

The most valuable animals lived in or near the water, and fur was at its best in late fall and winter when because of the cold weather it was thick and shiny with oil. To catch these animals and prevent them from biting off their clamped feet was delicate work. The trap had to be set in water so the caught animal would drown. But if the water was too deep, the mink, otter, muskrat, or beaver would swim over the trap. Therefore traps were set below slides or runs, or where paths entered the stream, or between rocks where the animal was known to pass. The trap was hidden in the water, but it had to be chained to a rock or root or sapling, or the animal would jerk it away and be carried downstream. Within minutes the prey must drown and its body be mostly concealed by the current. Trappers were very secretive about their methods and about their trails and sequences of sets, called traplines, stretched along streams. A thief who stumbled on a trapline
could follow it and steal every pelt that had been caught, not to mention the traps themselves. In some places furs were almost the medium of exchange, more than coins, more than blankets, more than anything except whiskey and rifles, and later tobacco.

Once animals were caught, their hides had to be peeled off and scraped carefully, so as not to cut or damage the valuable skin. The mink pelt was turned inside out like a sock, and a beaver pelt cut to stretch flat on a hoop made of grapevine or a hickory shoot, called a withe. Mink and otter hides were stretched inside out on boards or a bent limb. A trapper cached his furs in thickets and caves, usually dividing his hoard among several locations, in case one of them was found by Indians or white thieves. He also made his camp some distance from the trapline. Cured pelts could be tied in bundles and carried on packhorses. A trapper might come out of the woods in March with more wealth than the wages of a blacksmith or miller or weaver for a year’s work.

In his late teens Daniel Boone became widely known in the Yadkin area as an expert trapper and hunter, a deadly marksman. When he brought his furs into the county seat at Salisbury to trade for lead and powder, a new gun or new horse, he liked to take part in shooting matches, which were very popular. Boone seemed to always win and was so sure of his prowess he demonstrated trick shots, such as holding out his rifle with one hand only and hitting the target. According to Stephen Aron, “
The boldest supposedly outdid William Tell
by aiming at targets placed between legs instead of atop heads; probably a tall tale but graphically illustrative of the connection between marksmanship and manhood.”

Part of the legend of Boone at this time is the story of a young Catawba warrior named Saucy Jack, who was also proud of his reputation as a marksman. Apparently Boone had beaten him in a shooting match, or perhaps he just resented the reputation Boone had acquired. Inspired by whiskey on one of his visits to Salisbury, probably to sell his furs and hides, Saucy Jack bragged that he would kill this
Daniel Boone to show who was the better marksman. As was often the case, Boone was away hunting at the time, but when Squire Boone was told of the threat he grabbed a hatchet and went looking for Saucy Jack. “
Well, if it has come to this
, I’ll kill first,” the old blacksmith and former Quaker said. Luckily someone told Saucy Jack that Squire was looking for him and the brave sobered up enough to disappear to his village to the south along the Catawba River.

This story is significant because it not only illustrates the loyalty of the close-knit Boone family but also how Daniel himself was able to learn from his experience. In later life, when shooting with Indians, he was careful to let them win some too. “
I often went hunting with them
, and frequently gained their applause for my activity at our shooting matches. I was careful not to exceed many of them in shooting; for no people are more envious than they in this sport,” he told John Filson, his first biographer. This bit of wisdom almost certainly saved his life more than once and helped him survive in four months of captivity among the Shawnees in the late winter and spring of 1778. In general, Native Americans admired Boone as though he were one of their own and again and again showed him a particular respect. He returned their respect.

By 1751 the Catawbas, for whom the river west of the Yadkin was named, were mostly living on a tract of land the British government had given them on the river near the South Carolina line. The “People of the River” were a Siouan nation and had been known as fierce warriors earlier, but in the eighteenth century they became peaceful and cooperative with whites and absorbed refugees from many other nations fleeing from white incursions. The Catawbas were admired by all for their basket making and pottery.

Around this time, relations between Indians and whites on the western frontier began to be affected more and more by politics on a larger, even global scale. For almost two hundred years the rivals for dominance of North America had been Britain and France and Spain, countries now waging war on several other fronts as well, in what was
called the Seven Years’ War. North of Florida and east of the Mississippi it was primarily a struggle between France and Britain. The English had settled most of the eastern seaboard from Maine to Georgia, establishing the thriving port cities of Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston, as well as several cities at the fall lines of rivers where navigation stopped—Richmond, Albany, Philadelphia. The English had cleared land to raise tobacco, rice, cotton, and indigo. They’d built ships and hunted whales.

Instead of clearing land and building cities, the French had developed the fur trade with Indians in Canada and as far west as the lands of the Dakota Sioux, sent missionaries and explorers, married with the Natives. The French claimed all the land west of the Appalachian Mountains and had built forts at Detroit and along the Mississippi River. Their influence spread west into the plains and south to New Orleans, where they encountered the presence of the Spanish.

To strengthen their hold on the territories, both England and France formed alliances with the larger Indian nations. From the earliest times the English had allied themselves with the Iroquois, providing the Five Nations and then the Six Nations—with the addition of the Tuscaroras around 1722—with firearms, whiskey, trade goods. The Iroquois were a powerful confederation in what would become upstate New York, and they were effective in attacking the French and French allies like the Shawnees and Hurons. Many of the midwestern and Great Lakes Indians, such as the Shawnees, Mingoes, and Delawares, had earlier been driven out of their homelands by the English, and they were happy to side with the French against their old adversaries. The French encouraged their allies to attack the English settlements on the western frontier, and the English did not discourage their own allies, the Cherokees and Iroquois, from attacking the French and the French allies. The sorest point of contention in 1753 was western Pennsylvania, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers come together to form the Ohio, which the French called
la belle rivière
. Whoever could control the head of the river might dominate the wide river valley below.
Everyone, including Virginians such as George Washington, had their eye on the meadowlands and rolling hills of the Ohio Valley, called the Middle Ground.

Groups from the English colonies, such as the first Ohio Company and the Loyal Company, had already sent scouts into the region, hoping to claim the land and sell it to future settlers. Benjamin Franklin and others formed the Vandalia Company to claim land in the region. In 1750 Dr. Thomas Walker and a party for the Loyal Company crossed through Ouasiota, or Cumberland Gap, and wandered around the headwaters of the Big Sandy before returning to Virginia.
If hunters such as James Patton had tried
to keep the wilderness over the mountains a secret for their own enjoyment and exploitation, Walker had no such scruples.

In the same year, the woodsman Christopher Gist, a neighbor of the Boones on the Yadkin, was employed by the Ohio Company to make a probing excursion into the Ohio Valley, almost twenty years before Boone and John Findley would go there. Important political leaders, like Gov. Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia and young George Washington (who was only two years older than Daniel Boone), had these western lands very much on their minds also. Joseph J. Ellis has written, “
From 1754 to 1759, Washington spent
the bulk of his time west of the Blue Ridge, leading a series of expeditions into the Ohio Country that served as a crash course in the art of soldiering. They also provided him with a truly searing set of personal experiences that shaped his basic outlook on the world.” Washington, only twenty-one then but already a surveyor and ranger, with scout Christopher Gist and four others, was sent by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to march into the western wilderness in 1753 to warn the French to stay out of territory the English claimed. Though it was the middle of winter, Washington and Gist found the French, who initially treated them with great courtesy and then told them to go to hell.

The next summer, 1754, Washington was sent back into the wilderness with a small army to strengthen British claims there. But they
found the French had already built a stockade, Fort Duquesne, at the forks of the Ohio. Washington won an initial skirmish with the French and their Indian allies and built a blockhouse called Fort Necessity about thirty miles from Duquesne, but he was later attacked by the French and forced to surrender and return unharmed to Virginia.

In 1755 the British sent Gen. Edward Braddock to North America to assemble an army of British regulars and militia to drive the French out of Fort Duquesne and the western lands. Braddock had a considerable reputation as a military man, and he was confident he could expel the Indians and French trespassers. While in Philadelphia gathering his forces, he told Benjamin Franklin he was sure he could defeat the enemy in two or three days. Franklin warned him that Indians had their own way of fighting in the American backwoods. But Franklin later reported that Braddock “
smil’d at my Ignorance, and reply’d
‘These Savages may indeed be a formidable Enemy to your raw American militia; but upon the King’s regular and disciplined Troops, Sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.’”

A force of more than two thousand men was “embodied,” or brought together, from several colonies in June 1755 at Fort Cumberland in western Maryland. Maj. Edward Dobbs, son of the governor of North Carolina, brought a company from the western part of that colony, including Daniel Boone, who had joined as a teamster and blacksmith. Many people who would become important later were involved in the expedition to drive the French from Fort Duquesne. Daniel Morgan of Winchester, Virginia, who would later distinguish himself in the Revolution at the Battles of Saratoga and Cowpens, was there as a teamster for Washington’s militia, which would support Braddock’s army of regular soldiers.
According to Daniel Boone’s son Nathan
, his father said Daniel Morgan was a cousin of the Boones’, though modern scholars have not confirmed this claim.

It may have been at this time that Boone was initiated as a Freemason. Masonry was popular in Virginia, and Washington and many of the other officers of the militia were devoted Masons. Washington
had been initiated November 4, 1752, at the lodge in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Boone may have joined there also in 1755. During the later Revolutionary period
Washington would encourage the establishment
of military lodges among his army. Masonry served as a bulwark against monarchy and feudalism, Roman Catholicism, and the emotional extremes of some Protestant sects, and offered a way to put in practice new ideas of fraternity, progress, rational thought.

Thomas Gage, who would later serve as commander in chief of British forces in North America, was with Braddock as a young officer. Horatio Gates, who would later serve as a general with American forces in the Revolution, was also in the brigade. Dr. Thomas Walker, perhaps the first Englishman to find the gap called Ouasiota, which he renamed for the Duke of Cumberland, served as commissary for Brad-dock’s army. Among the men was a young trader named John Findley, who had gone down the Ohio to trade with Shawnees in Kentucky in 1752. He had seen the great meadows and the cane lands there, and he described them to young Boone.

Braddock’s campaign seemed to be under a curse from the beginning. Moving clumsily through the forest with artillery and a long baggage train, in terrain fit only for packhorses, not wheeled vehicles, it took the column a week to travel the first thirty miles. Braddock was neither the first nor the last general trained in European warfare to be baffled by the obstacles and cover provided by the American woods. On July 9, 1755, Braddock’s army crossed the Monongahela and, marching to fife and drum, followed by many pieces of artillery, proceeded toward Fort Duquesne for a bombardment and siege. Suddenly the path ahead was blocked by French Canadians, and the woods on either side erupted with rifle fire. Bullets tore into the red and blue uniformed soldiers. Hit by fire from both sides and the front, Braddock’s force was helpless.

It was an ambush that could have been avoided had Braddock used Indian scouts ahead and on either flank. A Delaware chief named Shingas had offered scouts if Braddock would assure him the Ohio
Valley would not be settled by the English. Braddock had answered, “
No savage should inherit the land
,” and said that, besides, he did not need their help. With no videttes or flanking scouts, Braddock had marched into a death trap.

It was reported later that the militiamen behaved better than the British soldiers once the attack began, perhaps because they were more familiar with woodland fighting. The soldiers panicked and began firing wildly, killing their own men. “
Entire companies were wiped out
by ‘friendly fire’ from British muskets. As Washington described it later, ‘they [militiamen] behaved like Men and died like Soldiers’ while the regulars ‘broke & run as sheep before Hounds.’”

Many years later Nathan Boone said his father
blamed Braddock for not using spies
and guards on his flanks. As a teamster Boone was with the baggage train to the rear. As the surviving soldiers began to retreat, shoving and leaping over each other in a rout, the teamsters were trapped in the melee. The French and Indians rushed to take prisoners, and the teamsters, unarmed and responsible for the heavy baggage wagons, were helpless as wounded and frightened soldiers stumbled back past them. To save himself, young Boone cut his horses loose and rode after the fleeing troops.