Daniel Boone Reaches Kentucky

Daniel Boone Reaches Kentucky

On June 7, 1769, Daniel Boone, America's most famous frontiersman, reportedly first glimpsed “Kentucke,” the virgin woodland that would eventually become the 15th state of the Union in 1792. The June 7 date is taken from the writings of John Filson, a Kentucky pioneer born in Pennsylvania, who went to Kentucky in 1783 and taught school. Filson wrote The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucky, published in 1784 with an appendix titled The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon. The information in the appendix, written in the first person, supposedly came from Boone, although Filson was the actual author. The schoolmaster's style apparently pleased the unlettered Boone, who declared that every word of Filson's account was true. Historians, however, do not consider the work completely reliable.

Whatever historical inaccuracies may occur in Filson's book, it served to spread the name of Daniel Boone to people of many countries who were excited by the American adventure and the heroes of the New World. Boone became the prototype of the rugged individualist-courageous, self-sufficient, and highly intelligent. A number of editions of Filson's book were published, including several in London and Paris, and the Boone “autobiography” no doubt inspired the seven stanzas Lord Byron devoted to Boone in the eighth canto of Don Juan, published in 1823.

Boone was not the first non-Native American to see Kentucky. Several others had preceded him. However, more than any other man, Boone literally opened Kentucky and the West to American settlers, physically leading them on foot by way of what is now called the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap.

Daniel Boone is believed to have been born on November 2, 1734, about 11 miles from Reading, Pennsylvania, of Quaker parents. His grandfather George Boone, a weaver and small farmer, had left his home near Exeter, England, and came to America in 1717, arriving in Philadelphia on October 10 of that year. His son Squire (a name, not a title) followed his father's vocations and also raised stock and became a blacksmith. Squire Boone's son Daniel, who had little or no regular schooling, helped with his father's work from early youth. By the time he was 12, he was an expert hunter. Even before his father had given him his first rifle, he had proved his marksmanship and hunting prowess with a spear.

As the spring thaw came to Pennsylvania in 1750, the family started for North Carolina. En route they stopped for about a year in the Shenandoah Valley, arriving at their destination (Buffalo Lick on the north fork of the Yadkin River) in 1751. Four years later, when a contingent of North Carolina militia joined a British military expedition against the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), Daniel Boone went along as a wagoner and may even have met the British commander's aide-de -camp, the 23-year-old Colonel George Washington.

General Edward Braddock, commander of British forces in North America and leader of the expedition, had been in America for only five months. He and his British regulars were unfamiliar with Native American fighting methods and, scornful of the colonials, ignored their warnings and suggestions. On July 9, 1755, while crossing the Monongahela River, Braddock and his men were attacked by a French and native force of about half their number, and the battle turned into a bloody rout. Two-thirds of Braddock's troops were killed or wounded. Braddock himself was mortally wounded and died four days later.

Boone escaped on one of his horses, as did John Finley, a Virginian hunter and trader who like Boone had joined Braddock as a wagoner. The acquaintance of the two men was to prove significant. Finley had already been to Kentucky and with great excitement described the wilderness to Boone.

Boone returned home to North Carolina where, on August 14, 1756, he married 17-year-old Rebeccah Bryan, a neighbor. She was to bear him ten children, and she may have inspired Boone's famous (albeit sexist) saying that all a man needed was a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife. In 1759 he moved his young family to Virginia, away from the threat of local Cherokee, who bitterly resented settlements in what had historically been their domain.

Over the next few years Boone probably took part in other battles of the French and Indian War, which continued until its official conclusion with the Treaty of Paris of 1763, thereby expelling the French from Canada and the Ohio River valley. The British followed up their victory over the French by moving to eliminate several sources of friction in the New World. One such British move, based on the belief that encroachment by settlers lay at the root of Native American unrest, was issuing the Proclamation of 1763. This document, which forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, was widely ignored by frontiersmen and land speculators. In the end it was simply one more on the list of colonial grievances against the British crown before the American Revolution.

Boone, always restless and eager for new areas to explore, was fascinated by stories about Florida, which the British took from Spain in 1763. After a visit to Florida, Boone returned home in 1765 and declared that he would like to settle in Pensacola. His wife, however, objected and Boone abandoned the project. Some time later, when John Finley visited Boone, the two men decided to head for Kentucky. Setting out on May 1, 1769, Finley, Boone, and Boone's brother-in-law John Stuart took along three other men to act as skinners and camp aides. The party evidently passed through the Cumberland Gap on June 7, and made camp in what is now Estill County in Kentucky.

In the next four or five months the party accumulated many pelts and hides, but Boone and Stuart were captured by Shawnee. By the time the two were released and returned to their party, the other men, even Finley, had had their fill of Kentucky and were ready to head back to their settlements. About the time that Finley and the skinners left, Boone's brother Squire appeared, accompanied by a man named Neeley. Some time later Stuart set out alone to hunt or explore and never returned to camp. The Boones and Neeley waited anxiously at their winter camp site for Stuart to return. After a while Neeley, who could stand the wilderness no longer, also departed. It was not until five years later that Boone, while clearing the Wilderness Road, came upon what might have been a clue to John Stuart's fate: a powder horn initialed J. S., not far from a human skeleton.

When Squire Boone had to go back to civilization in May 1770 to sell the brothers' accumulated pelts and get more ammunition, Daniel was left alone for what turned out to be three months of exploring this virgin land of beautiful hills and trees. At some time during this period another group of hunters, supposing themselves alone in the wilderness, were frightened by what seemed to them the sound of weird howling, unlike anything they had ever heard before. Investigation showed, however, that it was “only [Boone]…lying on a deerskin, alone in the wilderness, singing to the sunset out of his joyous heart.”

Squire Boone returned to the base camp on July 27, and the Boones continued their long hunt until March 1771, when they gathered up their valuable pelts and at last started home. On the way, they were attacked by Native Americans, and robbed of their furs. They escaped with their lives, and returned to the colonial settlements to tell of their adventures. In September 1773, with about 40 others including his own family, Boone set out for the Kentucky region with packhorses, livestock, other supplies, and plans to settle. However, his group was driven back by the local tribes, who killed some of their number, including Boone's oldest son, 16-year-old James.

After the Powell Valley Massacre, as the settlers were to call it, most of the group returned to North Carolina. Boone and his family, however, spent the winter on the neighboring Clinch River, where they found an abandoned cabin. In May 1774 Boone set off alone to stand once more at the side of his son's grave in Powell Valley. He was later to describe the visit as the most melancholy moment of his life.

One of the men interested in land speculation west of the Appalachians was the Scottish peer Lord Dunmore, then British colonial governor of Virginia. He had sent out several parties of surveyors to Kentucky, and some of them were still there when the war between Virginians and the native tribes, which came to be known as Lord Dunmore's War, broke out. Lord Dunmore assigned Boone to track down the surveyors and warn them of their danger. This Boone did, but before he returned he stopped to visit the new settlement of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, founded in 1774 and which was to become Kentucky's first permanent settlement. A competent surveyor himself, he took the time to lay off some lots and claim land. Then he headed back home to the Clinch, covering an 800-mile stretch of wilderness in two months.

Lord Dunmore's War was still raging, and Boone, a lieutenant of the Virginia militia, joined the forces of Andrew Lewis and may have been one of the 1,100 frontiersmen who fought the Shawnee warriors led by Chief Cornstalk on October 10, 1774. As a result of that battle, which took place at Point Pleasant in what is now West Virginia, Native American power was diminished in the Ohio River valley and the way west was opened for additional American settlers.

Meanwhile, revolutionary sentiments were running high on the eastern seaboard. With official British attention concentrating on stifling the spark of revolt, speculators began to eye the rich land of Kentucky. Among them was Colonel Richard Henderson, a North Carolinian attorney and a judge in the king's court. Like others he ignored the British prohibition against the westward movement of settlers across the Appalachians. Henderson and a group of men founded the Transylvania Company with the intention of opening most of present-day Kentucky to settlers, under the name Transylvania, which he hoped would be recognized as the 14th colony. Boone thus became an agent for Henderson's Transylvania Company and took on the assignment of exploring the territory, negotiating with the resident Cherokee and other tribes, and leading settlers through the wilderness to their new land of Transylvania.

On March 17, 1775, about 1,000 Cherokee gathered at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River, near what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee, close to the North Carolina border. There, in exchange for several thousand British pounds worth of trinkets and goods, Cherokee chiefs signed a treaty relinquishing Kentucky and deeding the land bounded by the Ohio and Kentucky Rivers, and extending to the south watershed of the Cumberland River to Richard Henderson and his Transylvania Company.

Boone could not wait through the socializing and oratory that preceded the treaty; he was a week into his journey by the day of the actual signing. With the first contingent of settlers, Boone set out to mark and clear the 250 miles from the Long Island of the Holston River in northeastern Tennessee to the Kentucky River deep in Kentucky. Boone marked the pioneer trail that would be known as the Wilderness Road following the trace, or path, made by buffalo and Native Americans, clearing brush, chopping branches, blazing trees, and using stone markers along the miles of mountain ridges, through almost impassable valleys and across rushing streams. The men in Boone's trailblazing party knew they were on a great adventure, and some of them kept diaries. One man wrote about a “turrible mountain that tried us all almost to death to git over it and we lodge this night…under a grait mountain & Roast a fine fat turkey for our supper.” Although Boone and his men had clearly marked the trail, the literal wilderness of the Wilderness Road was still to be reckoned with. It would be 20 years before wagons could be used on the trail, but in those 20 years 100,000 people took themselves and their possessions over the mountainous passes and into Kentucky.

On April 1, 1775, Boone and his men arrived at their destination and began building a fort. Their settlement, which was to become Boonesboro (or Boonesborough), was southeast of what is now Lexington, Kentucky. Henderson was not far behind. Once arrived, most of the men would not be kept within the protective walls of the fort, but set about claiming their own parcels of land and building houses to which they could bring their wives and families. Under the aegis of Richard Henderson, Daniel and Squire Boone and delegates from other Kentucky settlements gathered on May 23, 1775, to decide the rules by which they would be governed.

During the next two years, while the 13 colonies were becoming increasingly involved in the Revolutionary War against Britain, Boone was fully occupied by hunting, trapping, surveying, and defending the new Kentucky settlements against Native American raids and attacks-many of which were encouraged by the British. When Kentucky became a county of Virginia in late 1776, Boone was made a captain of the Virginia militia. He was later promoted to major and then lieutenant colonel.

In February 1778 Boone and a group of 30 Boonesboro men went to the Blue Licks on the Licking River to obtain salt for the settlement. Leaving the salt camp one day to check his beaver traps, Boone was captured by a war party. Taken back to the Shawnee camp, he learned from Chief Blackfish that the Shawnee were on their way to take Boonesboro. Boone, famous for his speed in running, was also a fast thinker. He convinced Blackfish that the winter was no time to take the women and children of Boonesboro through the deep woods and up to the British commander in Detroit, who would buy the captives from the Shawnee. Instead, Boone suggested, he would talk the men at Blue Licks into surrendering if Blackfish promised that they would not be tortured or humiliated by having to run the gauntlet. Blackfish agreed, the men surrendered, and the Shawnee made their way with their captives to Detroit where the prisoners were delivered into British hands, except for Boone, whose popularity with the Shawnee was so high that they refused to sell him to the British commander. Instead they adopted him into their tribe as the son of Chief Blackfish and gave him the name Sheltowee, which means “big turtle.” For months Boone lived with Shawnee as a captive.

When Boone learned that the Shawnee were again planning a full-scale attack on Boonesboro and that he, as the adopted son of the chief, was to go along and persuade the settlers to surrender, he escaped. He traveled so fast that the Shawnee were unable to catch him; he covered 160 miles in four days (three days on foot). He was a strange but welcome sight when he returned to Boonesboro, his head shorn free of his usually long hair except for the Shawnee -style scalp lock. Having warned the settlers of the imminent attack, Boone led a group of scouts and fighters north into Ohio to strike at the oncoming Shawnee and then raced back to help in the defense of Boonesboro. He got back to the fort on September 6, just a day before the arrival of Blackfish and 450 Shawnee warriors. Although there were only 50 rifles within Boonesboro's fortified walls, many of them fired by boys, the Shawnee were driven off.

After spending some time in the east, Boone returned to Kentucky with his family and more settlers in October 1779. In 1780 he established Boone's Station near what is now Athens, Kentucky. It was also in 1780 that the county of Kentucky was divided into three parts, and Boone was elected to the Virginia legislature.

The Commonwealth of Kentucky was admitted to the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792. Boone, in spite of his enormous service to Kentucky as a pioneer, founder, soldier, and legislator, now found himself bankrupt and in debt. He had laid claim to 100,000 acres of land, but had been careless about filing claims. That, plus the fact that Virginia had never recognized the Transylvania Company's original land claims, and the general confusion and incompetence of early land courts, left him with no defense to protect his property. One by one a series of ejectment suits wiped out Boone's ownership of his many tracts of land. Disgusted, Boone put Kentucky behind him forever. In 1799 he set out for what is now Missouri, then part of the vast Spanish province of Louisiana. Boone, in his mid 60s, had unusually high physical stamina. He prepared for the trip out of Kentucky by felling a huge tree, which he made into a dugout to transport his wife, children, and household possessions down the Big Sandy River while he and some companions went on foot herding the livestock all the way.

Once in Missouri, it seemed for a while that Boone had finally received the recognition he deserved. The Spanish officials of the area welcomed him warmly and granted him a large tract of land at the mouth of the Femme Osage Creek near the Missouri River. On July 11, 1800, he was appointed chief magistrate for the Spanish crown of the Femme Osage District. Once again, however, land ownership became an uncertain thing. First, Spain ceded Louisiana to France in 1800. Then, only three years later, the vast province was sold to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Boone's land title, guaranteed by the Spanish governor, was voided by American land commissioners on technicalities. Finally, after many government delays and many petitions by Boone, his large land holdings in Missouri were restored to him in part by the direct intercession of Congress in 1814. Boone sold the land and traveled back to Kentucky to pay his debts, which according to popular legend “left him with a great sense of satisfaction and 50 cents.”

Boone's wife Rebeccah died in 1813 after 56 years of marriage. Boone went to live with his son, Nathan, in what was probably Missouri's first stone residence. He continued to hunt and trap and enjoy life until, nearly 86 years old, he died on September 26, 1820. Missouri's territorial legislature went into mourning for Boone, the prototype of the American frontiersman. Just three years after his death, James Fenimore Cooper published the first of his Leatherstocking Tales, which were frontier adventure novels based at least in part on Boone's exploits. Although Boone and his wife both died in Missouri, their remains were returned to Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1845, where they were reinterred and a monument erected in their memory.