DANIEL BOONE AND THE FOUNDING OF KENTUCKY

. . . Boone lived hunting up to ninety;
And, what's still stranger, left behind a name
For which men vainly decimate the throng,
Not only famous, but of that GOOD fame,
Without which glory's but a tavern song,--
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,
Which hate nor envy e'er could tinge with wrong;

'T is true he shrank from men, even of his nation;
When they built up unto his darling trees,
He moved some hundred miles off, for a station
Where there were fewer houses and more ease;

* * * * * * *

But where he met the individual man,
He showed himself as kind as mortal can.

* * * * * * *

The freeborn forest found and kept them free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.

And tall, and strong, and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city's pale abortions,
Because their thoughts had never been the prey
Of care or gain; the green woods were their portions

* * * * * * *

Simple they were, not savage; and their rifles,
Though very true, were yet not used for trifles.

* * *

Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.
--Byron.



DANIEL BOONE AND THE FOUNDING OF KENTUCKY

Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in our history as
the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a
true pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of
Indian-fighters, game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods
farmers who, generation after generation, pushed westward the
border of civilization from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he
himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the
wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western
North Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme
frontier. There he married, built a log cabin, and hunted,
chopped trees, and tilled the ground like any other frontiersman.
The Alleghany Mountains still marked a boundary beyond which the
settlers dared not go; for west of them lay immense reaches of
frowning forest, uninhabited save by bands of warlike Indians.
Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper penetrated this
immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he
had seen and done.

In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales,
determined himself to cross the mountains and find out what
manner of land it was that lay beyond. With a few chosen
companions he set out, making his own trail through the gloomy
forest. After weeks of wandering, he at last emerged into the
beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky, for which, in after
years, the red men and the white strove with such obstinate fury
that it grew to be called "the dark and bloody ground." But when
Boone first saw it, it was a fair and smiling land of groves and
glades and running waters, where the open forest grew tall and
beautiful, and where innumerable herds of game grazed, roaming
ceaselessly to and fro along the trails they had trodden during
countless generations. Kentucky was not owned by any Indian
tribe, and was visited only by wandering war-parties and
hunting-parties who came from among the savage nations living
north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.

A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and
killed him, and the others then left Boone and journeyed home;
but his brother came out to join him, and the two spent the
winter together. Self-reliant, fearless, and the frowning defiles
of Cumberland Gap, they were attacked by Indians, and driven
back--two of Boone's own sons being slain. In 1775, however, he
made another attempt; and this attempt was successful. The
Indians attacked the newcomers; but by this time the parties of
would-be settlers were sufficiently numerous to hold their own.
They beat back the Indians, and built rough little hamlets,
surrounded by log stockades, at Boonesborough and Harrodsburg;
and the permanent settlement of Kentucky had begun.

The next few years were passed by Boone amid unending Indian
conflicts. He was a leader among the settlers, both in peace and
in war. At one time he represented them in the House of Burgesses
of Virginia; at another time he was a member of the first little
Kentucky parliament itself; and he became a colonel of the
frontier militia. He tilled the land, and he chopped the trees
himself; he helped to build the cabins and stockades with his own
hands, wielding the longhandled, light-headed frontier ax as
skilfully as other frontiersmen. His main business was that of
surveyor, for his knowledge of the country, and his ability to
travel through it, in spite of the danger from Indians, created
much demand for his services among people who wished to lay off
tracts of wild land for their own future use. But whatever he
did, and wherever he went, he had to be sleeplessly on the
lookout for his Indian foes. When he and his fellows tilled the
stump-dotted fields of corn, one or more of the party were always
on guard, with weapon at the ready, for fear of lurking savages.
When he went to the House of Burgesses he carried his long rifle,
and traversed roads not a mile of which was free from the danger
of Indian attack. The settlements in the early years depended
exclusively upon game for their meat, and Boone was the mightiest
of all the hunters, so that upon him devolved the task of keeping
his people supplied. He killed many buffaloes, and pickled the
buffalo beef for use in winter. He killed great numbers of black
bear, and made bacon of them, precisely as if they had been hogs.
The common game were deer and elk. At that time none of the
hunters of Kentucky would waste a shot on anything so small as a
prairie-chicken or wild duck; but they sometimes killed geese and
swans when they came south in winter and lit on the rivers.

But whenever Boone went into the woods after game, he had
perpetually to keep watch lest he himself might be hunted in
turn. He never lay in wait at a game-lick, save with ears
strained to hear the approach of some crawling red foe. He never
crept up to a turkey he heard calling, without exercising the
utmost care to see that it was not an Indian; for one of the
favorite devices of the Indians was to imitate the turkey call,
and thus allure within range some inexperienced hunter.

Besides this warfare, which went on in the midst of his usual
vocations, Boone frequently took the field on set expeditions
against the savages. Once when he and a party of other men were
making salt at a lick, they were surprised and carried off by the
Indians. The old hunter was a prisoner with them for some months,
but finally made his escape and came home through the trackless
woods as straight as the wild pigeon flies. He was ever on the
watch to ward off the Indian inroads, and to follow the
warparties, and try to rescue the prisoners. Once his own
daughter, and two other girls who were with her, were carried off
by a band of Indians. Boone raised some friends and followed the
trail steadily for two days and a night; then they came to where
the Indians had killed a buffalo calf and were camped around it.
Firing from a little distance, the whites shot two of the
Indians, and, rushing in, rescued the girls. On another occasion,
when Boone had gone to visit a salt-lick with his brother, the
Indians ambushed them and shot the latter. Boone himself escaped,
but the Indians followed him for three miles by the aid of a
tracking dog, until Boone turned, shot the dog, and then eluded
his pursuers. In company with Simon Kenton and many other noted
hunters and wilderness warriors, he once and again took part in
expeditions into the Indian country, where they killed the braves
and drove off the horses. Twice bands of Indians, accompanied by
French, Tory, and British partizans from Detroit, bearing the
flag of Great Britain, attacked Boonesboroug. In each case Boone
and his fellowsettlers beat them off with loss. At the fatal
battle of the Blue Licks, in which two hundred of the best
riflemen of Kentucky were beaten with terrible slaughter by a
great force of Indians from the lakes, Boone commanded the left
wing. Leading his men, rifle in hand, he pushed back and
overthrew the force against him; but meanwhile the Indians
destroyed the right wing and center, and got round in his rear,
so that there was nothing left for Boone's men except to flee
with all possible speed.

As Kentucky became settled, Boone grew restless and ill at ease.
He loved the wilderness; he loved the great forests and the great
prairielike glades, and the life in the little lonely cabin,
where from the door he could see the deer come out into the
clearing at nightfall. The neighborhood of his own kind made him
feel cramped and ill at ease. So he moved ever westward with the
frontier; and as Kentucky filled up he crossed the Mississippi
and settled on the borders of the prairie country of Missouri,
where the Spaniards, who ruled the territory, made him an
alcalde, or judge. He lived to a great age, and died out on the
border, a backwoods hunter to the last.

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