% 0".*;";.''. 'V cP\.* .^' ^^-^ ^- ^-...„.%/" ■-^Vv ^^^ ^- .%'^^ % rO^ ""■^V'rlii'^^^':lS% = ^ - mrr:^.^ . ,^ ^ G^' cP\\ ,6 0^' *^ i. r't ^AO^ t^S.^ :iiK'^'^''^ ^ ^^^m^^^^ V ^' : %<^ ^MCi\ DANIEL BOONE AND THE WILDERNESS ROAD jj^^^ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO Daniel Boone From painting by Chester Harding, owned by Colonel Reuben T, Durrett, of Louisville, Kentucky DANIEL BOONE AND THE WILDERNESS ROAD BY H. ADDINGTON BRUCE AUTHOR OF **THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN EXPANSION,*' ETC. ILLUSTRATED THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1910 jiU rights reserved Copyright, 1910, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1910. Norivood Press J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. ©CLA265216 TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIENDS CHARLES FLOYD PERSONS AND AGNES GEORGE PERSONS PREFACE In his old age, though in no spirit of boastfulness, Daniel Boone declared that "the history of the west- ern country has been my history." Undoubtedly, of all the men who took part in the winning of the early West, none played so conspicuous a role as Boone, or a role of such extensive usefulness. His services to his country began in the bitter struggle of the French and Indian War, that colossal conflict which definitely eliminated France as a factor in New World colonization. It was he, more than any other man, who made England's colonists ac- quainted with the beauty and fertility of the vast and well-nigh unoccupied region between the Alle- ghanies and the Mississippi. To his bold pioneering the United States owes one of its greatest highways of empire — the famous Wilderness Road, along which so many thousands of home-seekers passed in the first peopling of the West. Throughout the stormy years of the Revolution, he was preeminent in the defence of the infant settlements which he had viii Preface done so much to plant in the country beyond the mountains. And, finally, after the Revolution, when the American people had begun to take possession of the new territory gained and held for them by him and his fellow-pioneers, Boone once more entered upon his self-imposed mission of pointing the way for his countrymen to the land of the setting sun ; and, having crossed the Mississippi, died as he had lived — in the very forefront of civilization. The attempt, therefore, to write such a book as the present — which is intended to serve the double purpose of a biography of Daniel Boone and a study of the first phase of the territorial growth of the United States — finds ample justification in the facts of Boone's career. On the biographical side the effort has been made not only to give as complete and accurate an account of Boone's life as is now possible, but also to estimate and make clear his specific contributions to the progress of the nation ; while on the historical side my chief aim has been to describe the process of expansion in its military, political, economic, and social aspects. This has necessitated a somewhat detailed examination of the characteristics of the people who won the West, and the measures they took — notably in the organiza- tion of the Watauga, Transylvania, and Cumberland Preface IX settlements — to establish the institutions of civilized society in their isolated wilderness communities. But I have endeavored to accomplish this portion of my task without causing the reader to lose sight of the great central figure of the narrative. In any event, I believe that only by gaining an understanding of the life and spirit and ideals of the sturdy folk of the frontier, is it possible to appreciate Boone's place in history and the bearing of the early westward move- ment on the subsequent development of the United States. I am, of course, under obligations to previous writers, particularly to Boone's leading biographers. Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites and Dr. John M. Peck ; to the distinguished author of " The Winning of the West"; to the early historians of Kentucky and Tennessee; to the contributors to the excellent Filson Club publications; and to Professor A. B. Hulbert, author of the " Historic Highways of America " series of monographs. I am further in- debted to Dr. Thwaites for helpful advice, as also to Professors Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard University, and Colonels Reuben T. Durrett and Bennett H. Young, of Louisville, Kentucky. I would also thank Captain Edward M. Drane, of Frankfort, Kentucky, for assistance X Preface in illustrating my book, and Mr. T. Gilbert White, of New York, for permission to reproduce his two beautiful paintings now in the Kentucky State Capi- tol. Much valuable material to which I could not otherwise have had access — especially in the way of rare copies of early Western newspapers — has been placed at my disposal by the authorities of Harvard University Library, for whose sympathetic coopera- tion I desire to express sincere gratitude. And, as in all my undertakings, I owe much to the wise counsel and aid of my wife. H. ADDINGTON BRUCE. Cambridge, Mass., April 4, 1 910. CONTENTS Preface CHAPTER I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. Index The Youth of Daniel Boone , Boone's First Campaign Dark Days on the Border . Boone's Explorations in Kentucky The People who followed Boone Westward Ho ! . The Building of the Wilderness Road Boone as a Law-maker The Passing of Transylvania War-time in Kentucky The Campaigning of George Rogers Clark Boone among the Indians The Last Years of the War Pioneering in Watauga From Watauga to the Cumberland Annals of the Wilderness Road . Kentucky after the Revolution . Boone's Last Years PAGE vii 17 36 49 68 84 lOI 1 12 133 153 173 199 221 247 264 281 301 325 343 ILLUSTRATIONS Daniel Boone ..... Frontispiece ■ PAGE Boone's First Glimpse of Kentucky • 54^ James Robertson .... 78'^ The Sycamore Shoals Treaty . 98 = Relics of Daniel Boone . 126 Simon Kenton ..... . 162 George Rogers Clark .... . 186 Memorial Wall to Heroines of Bryan's Station . 238 John Sevier ..... 256 Cumberland Gap and the Wilderness Road 292 Site of Boonesborough .... 304 Boone's Cabin in Missouri . 336 Map of the Early West 341 xm Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road CHAPTER I THE YOUTH OF DANIEL BOONE DANIEL BOONE, as every schoolboy knows, is the typical American backwoodsman. He was never so much at home as when treading the pathless wilderness, rifle in hand, in quest of game or of the pioneer's mortal foe, the wily Indian. Always Boone kept in the forefront of civilization, pointing the way for its advance but never allowing it quite to overtake him. Not city streets, but the mountain, the forest, and the prairie were his habitat. And he came honestly by his un- quenchable passion for the wild and open life of the backwoods and the border. He was born in a log-cabin, remote from the refinements and allurements of civilization; and he had for parents plain, simple country folk, accus- tomed to hardships and at all times preferring the freedom of the frontier to the crowded, hurried. 2 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road worried existence of the town. His mother was the daughter of an unassuming Welsh Quaker, John Morgan. His father, who bore the odd name of Squire, was an Englishman by birth, a native of the obscure Devonshire village of Bradninch. Although bred a Quaker, Squire Boone seems to have had in his veins a touch of the longing for excitement and adventure that sent Hawkins and Drake and those other old-time sea-dogs of Devon on their epoch- making voyages. At all events, when scarcely in his teens, he became profoundly interested in re- ports of the Quaker paradise said to have been established by William Penn on the other side of the Atlantic. It was unfortunately the case that in England, and even in New England, Quakers were subject to bitter and bloody persecution, and many of them led most wretched lives. In Penn's dominions, on the contrary, according to the story which in time found its way to the farthest corners of the old country, not only were Quaker refugees absolutely free from molestation by religious bigots, but they were on the friendliest of terms with the native Indians, were making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and were in every way living amid the most delightful surroundings. His curiosity roused to a high pitch, young Boone one fine day took ship for Philadelphia, in company The Youth of Daniel Boone 3 with a brother, George, and a sister, Sarah. Their immediate object was to verify the rumors they had heard, and to determine for themselves the fitness of Pennsylvania as a place of residence for the en- tire family, their father having signified his willing- ness to emigrate if the outlook seemed promising. To us of to-day this sailing of Squire Boone — whose American-born son was to serve as guide to the American people in the first stage of the wonder- ful westward march that has carried them to the shore of the Pacific and beyond — cannot but seem a most noteworthy occurrence. Yet history is silent concerning it. The ship that carried the youthful Boones was not a Mayflower or a Susan Con- stant. It was simply one of many others employed in the emigrant trade, and even its name and the port of its departure have long since passed into oblivion. Whether the crossing was smooth or rough, whether the Boones enjoyed it or regretted ever having set foot aboard, it is impossible to say. The probability is that they were herded together in unpleasant quarters with a small army of fellow- emigrants, — for people were already flocking to Pennsylvania, — and that they were heartily glad when they saw the low, thin, blue line indicating land ahead. At an uncertain date in the years 1712, 1 713, or 1 714 their ship swung in between the capes of the Delaware, proceeded up the river, on whose 4 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road banks were still visible the ruins of Sweden's ill- fated experiment in colonization three-quarters of a century before, and eventually landed the ardent, hopeful Boones in Philadelphia. It needed only a few months of travel and explora- tion to convince them that rumor had not unduly exaggerated the beauties and riches and advantages of Pennsylvania. In high good humor brother George hurried back to bring out their father and mother and the younger children; sister Sarah gave a favorable ear to the advances of a matrimoni- ally inclined German, and, as Mrs. Jacob Stover, became the mistress of a rude but perpetually neat cabin home in what is to-day Berks County; while Squire Boone, for his part, roamed with all the rest- lessness of youth through the country about Phila- delphia, eventually choosing for his home the frontier hamlet of North Wales, and settHng down to the hard life of a Pennsylvania backwoodsman. It was in North Wales that he met Sarah Morgan, and it was on the 23d of July, 1720, that they were married in a Quaker meeting-house and in accordance with the simple Quaker ceremony. A family tradition, quoted by Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, Daniel Boone's latest and best biographer, pictures Squire Boone as "a man of rather small stature, fair complexion, red hair, and gray eyes''; while his wife was "a woman something over the The Youth of Daniel Boone 5 common size, strong and active, with black hair and eyes. There was no honeymoon — merely the rough and boisterous yet sincere rejoicings after the back- woods fashion, and then the young couple laid aside their wedding garments, and plunged once more into the business of life. Very poor they were, yet very happy, and their happiness was soon increased — as likewise their cares and responsibilities — by the advent of children, four of whom were born to them during the dozen years they remained in the North Wales country. At the end of that time Squire Boone had saved enough money to buy a farm of his own, and he decided to remove to Oley Township — in the modern Berks County — where now lived not only his sister Sarah but his parents and several younger brothers and sisters. The Boones, indeed, were sufficiently numerous in that part of Berks to give the name of Exeter to one of its townships, in honor of the ancient Devonshire city that stood only a few miles from their native village. In Oley Township, then, in the beautiful valley of the Schuylkill, and for what would seem to us a ridiculously small sum. Squire Boone became the owner of a tract of two hundred and fifty acres. Most of it was in woodland, — that is to say, the hardest sort of work would be necessary to make 6 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road it fit for cultivation, — but Boone's arms were strong and his heart courageous, and with right good-will he began to make a clearing. Erelong the smoke from another cabin was rising above the trees of Oley Township, a token to all who saw it that one more pioneer family had joined in the labor of con- quering that portion of the Pennsylvania wilderness. In this cabin, Nov. 2, 1734, Daniel Boone made his initial appearance on the stage of life. Had he been a first-born his arrival might have been ac- counted an event, and something made of it. But being only a sixth child, — another had been born since the departure from North Wales, — he was regarded from so distinctly matter-of-fact a point of view that nothing whatever is known with respect to his infancy. It may safely be taken for granted, though, that he was left pretty much to shift for himself as soon as he was able to go about on hands and knees. This was a way pioneer mothers had, and that it was not a bad way is clearly evidenced by the sturdiness of their deer-stalking, Indian- fighting sons. It may also be reasonably conjectured that the little Daniel's infantile amusements included play- ing with his father's powder-horn, tugging at his father's rifle as it lay carelessly thrown on a settee after the return from a hunt, or staring fixedly and eagerly at it when it reposed in its accustomed place The Youth of Daniel Boone 7 against the wall. If, as is said, the child is father of the man, these and similar toys must have held Daniel Boone's attention at an unusually early age. Certainly, he was still a very small boy when he began to give indications of the remarkable fondness for hunting which was characteristic of him even in extreme old age. It is difficult to realize that his birthplace, only a few miles south of the progressive city of Reading, and in the heart of one of Penn- sylvania's most populous counties, boasting, as it does, close upon one hundred and seventy-five thou- sand inhabitants, was in the days of Boone's boyhood a grim, sparsely settled frontier region, abounding in game of every description. Against the smaller sort of creatures — squirrels and chipmunks and birds — he soon declared war, tracking them in imitation of a veteran huntsman, and slaying them with a knob-rooted sapling, which he learned to hurl with remarkable dexterity. This, too, when he was not more than ten years old. A little later — to be precise, at the age of twelve — his father surprised and delighted him with the gift of a hght rifle. Gone forever was the knob- rooted sapling, thrown aside in the exuberance of his joy at this wonderful present. He was a man now, a man full grown, he told himself, for did he not carry the weapon of a man .? And he patted its stock fondly, and peered eagerly through the under- 8 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road growth in search of some fierce beast of prey to overcome. In point of sheer fact, for all his feelings of bigness and self-importance, he was just a freckled, bare- foot, ragged little urchin, who frequently gave his parents a great deal of trouble by neglecting his duties as herd-boy in order to play Nimrod in the surround- ing forest. He, they knew, could take care of him- self, but the cattle required attention, and it some- times was no easy matter to ascertain where they had strayed. But it was impossible long to be angry with him, so intensely earnest was he in his hunting expeditions; and, recognizing this, his parents, instead of scolding him, turned his fondness for hunting to good account by commissioning him to provide the wild meat for the family table. They could have found no occupation more congenial to him, and none better calculated to train him for his life-work. He became an unerring shot, an ex- pert woodsman, acquainted with the ways of furred and feathered Hfe, and schooHng himself admirably in many another text-book of nature. Of schooling as most boys know it, however, he had next to none. The majority of his biographers assert that he went for a time to an "old field" school, where he acquired the rudiments of "book learning" in the form of easy lessons in the spelling- book and Psalter, together with some slight instruc- The Youth of Daniel Boone 9 tion in writing and arithmetic. One author even goes so far as to give imaginary details of his school life, including an obviously fanciful account of a singular and reprehensible trick played by Boone and some fellow-pupils on their schoolmaster, who is described as a worthless drunkard. Of course Virtue, as typified in these fascinating juvenile vagabonds, triumphed over Vice, the learned but dissolute pedagogue. V The truth seems to be that, at all events in the role of scholar, Boone never saw the inside of a school- room; but was indebted for such education as he received to his mother and a young sister-in-law, the wife of his much older brother Samuel. Both of these devoted instructors, although they must have found in the restless, nature-loving, active boy a most difficult pupil, took pains enough, as we shall see, to enable him in after-life to write interesting, if badly spelled letters; and to earn his living as a surveyor. He also received some manual training of a useful sort. His great-grandfather on the paternal side had been a blacksmith, his grandfather — who died in Berks County when Daniel was in his tenth year — a weaver; and both of these occupations were fol- lowed by his father as soon as the farm was sufficiently cleared to permit of his devoting some part of his attention to interests other than agricultural. He 10 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road kept half a dozen looms at work making "home- spun'* for his neighbors and for the Philadelphia market, and the cheery blaze of his forge was a wel- come sight to tired travellers after a day's journey through the forest. As between the two — the loom and the forge — Daniel infinitely preferred the latter; but, we are told, only because it enabled him to repair broken rifles and traps. Everything was sub- ordinated to his zeal for the life out doors, and each succeeding year he awaited with growing impatience the approach of winter as the happy season when he would be free to give full rein to his passion for the chase. For, from the time he was thirteen he made it his custom to spend every winter hunting. All through Berks County, and far into the forests and mountains beyond, he wandered, exploring the country so thoroughly that for miles roundabout there was scarcely a foot of territory unknown to him. The Blue Mountain and South Mountain ranges became as famiUar to him as the undulating hills of his father's Oley farm. Many a day he climbed Penn's Mount, near the site of Reading, and from its summit beheld the snow-laden clouds gather over the far- extending valleys. Sometimes, laden with furs, he journeyed down the Schuylkill to Philadelphia, then a most picturesque little city, with its Tudor cottages, its orchards, its gardens, and its bustling The Youth of Daniel Boone ii water-front, where ships were constantly coming and going, bringing in all manner of strange people from foreign parts, and taking out the rich produce of the New World. Thus his life passed until he reached his sixteenth year — an irresponsible, roaming, care-free life, but in its own way stimulating to ambition and not devoid of achievement. At sixteen there was no better woodsman in all eastern Pennsylvania than Daniel Boone. Thanks to the wise policy of William Penn and his Quaker successors in the governing of Pennsylvania, it had not been necessary for him, while thus serving his apprenticeship in the forest, to match his wits against those of the Indian, as would have been the case had his boyhood been spent in almost any other part of the frontier. He saw plenty of Indians, but they were always friendly. Nevertheless, as though with an instinctive fore- warning of what the future had in store for him, he gave himself to a most careful study of their traits and habits. This — like the pursuit of the deer, the bear, and the wolf — meant hours of patient trailing and of hawk-like watching from the concealment afforded by thicket, log, and stump. It was a fascinating game, — this mimic hunt of unsuspecting warriors, — and it aided immeasurably both in the success that Boone afterwards won as an Indian fighter, and in 12 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road the formation of his character. It developed in him remarkable powers of observation, it increased his self-conjfidence and self-reliance, and it accustomed him to the exercise of great self-control. Still more, it awoke a desire to penetrate to those distant wilds whence the Indians emerged, as by magic, whenever they came to visit the Pennsylvania settlements. To spur the same desire was the knowledge that the game which he was so fond of hunting was rapidly disappearing from Berks County before the advance of civilized man. It is easy, therefore, to understand the satisfaction with which Boone one day heard his father announce his in- tention of disposing of his Pennsylvania lands and removing to the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, five hundred miles and more to the southwest, one of the richest farming sections of the colonial South, and, at that time, a veritable paradise for game. Just why Squire Boone should wish to abandon the pleasant home which he had built up with such painful effort, does not appear.^ Nor is there any- ^ It is suggested by Dr. Thwaites that possibly Squire Boone moved from Pennsylvania because "the choicest lands of eastern Pennsylvania had at last been located," and "the outlook for the younger Boones, who soon would need homesteads, did not appear encouraging." But this seems scarcely an adequate explanation, particularly in view of the great fertility of the Schuylkill Valley, The Youth of Daniel Boone 13 thing to show why he chose the distant Yadkin Valley as his future place of abode. But to us these are matters of comparative unimportance. The great point is that the removal was determined on, and that its outcome, in due course of time, was to give Daniel Boone an unsurpassed opportunity to distinguish himself as an explorer and path-finder of the wilderness — an opportunity which it may safely be said would never have been his had he remained in Berks. Some time in the spring of 1750 the start for North Carolina was made, the caravan of canvas-covered wagons that carried the family of Squire Boone push- ing on as rapidly as possible to Harper's Ferry and the Valley of Virginia, that magnificent tableland which extends for three hundred miles between the which Squire Boone would ordinarily be reluctant to abandon even for the sake of the "younger Boones." Perhaps the inrush of "foreign" immigrants, of the non-English-speaking Dunkards and Mennonites and Schwenckfelders, who flocked into Berks County between the years 1720 and 1750, may have had something to do with his removal. Or there may have been some connection be- tween the removal and the fact that both Squire Boone and his son Israel were "disowned" by the Society of Friends — Squire in 1748, or but two years before his departure to North Carolina. There was by no means a general Boone exodus from the vicinity. I have seen a list of Exeter Township taxables for 1759, and in it occur the names of Joseph, James, William, Benjamin, and John Boone. 14 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies from the Potomac to the Iron Mountains in the extreme southwest section of the State after which the valley is named. Few details of the journey have been preserved, but it is known that Boone acted as hunter and scout for the caravan, and that the valley's charms proved so attractive that all thoughts of haste were laid aside. There is a story, though based only on tra- dition, that the travellers camped for many months, perhaps even for a year, on Linnville Creek, near Harrisonburg, in Rockingham County, Virginia. Wherever they lingered, it was not until the late autumn of 175 1 that they crossed the Blue Ridge near the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina and found themselves within striking distance of their destination. This was reached when they arrived at the forks of the Yadkin, in Davie County, North Carolina. Here, as Squire Boone's practised eye at once per- ceived, a region of splendid possibilities from a farming standpoint offered itself to all comers; and casting about, he soon selected a claim where Dutch- man's Creek empties its waters into the North Yadkin, and once more began the arduous task of con- quering the forest and transforming weedy wastes into profitable fields. As for young Daniel, we may feel confident that whenever the opportunity offered, he would steal The Youth of Daniel Boone 15 away from the wood-chopping and the ploughing to enjoy a day's hunt. Although a century and a half has elapsed since the crack of his rifle first woke the echoes of the Carolina mountains, the Old North State can still offer attractions to the hunter of big game. At the time of Boone's coming it teemed, from the Piedmont region westward, with beasts and birds of every description. The buffalo, the elk, the Virginia deer, the bear, the panther, the wild- cat, wolf, and fox wandered through the meadows and cane-brakes about its rivers, or took their repose amid the cool shades of its rocky heights. Here, in truth, as Boone enthusiastically told his father and his more phlegmatic brothers, was hunting worth the name. In imagination it is no difficult matter to see him, his five foot ten of sinewy, buck-skinned manhood stretched at full length behind a fallen log, finger on trigger, ear alert, blue eyes gleaming, thin lips doggedly compressed, a healthy glow on his cheek. Or, it may be, cutting his way through a tangle of undergrowth, leaping silently from rock to rock across the bed of a fast-running mountain stream, and buoyantly clambering from ridge to ridge of some bristhng mountain wall. Never, they say, was there such a hunter on the Yadkin, or one who so enjoyed the hunter's Hfe. Young, ardent, tire- less, burdened with few cares and carrying them i6 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road lightly, Daniel Boone found these first years in North Carolina pleasant indeed. But the time for a rude awakening was drawing near. All too soon he would have the realities of life thrust upon him, would discover that it is made up of something besides the hunt, the feast, and the frolic. For, while he was light-heartedly tracking the sullen bear to its lair, and merrily dressing the freshly slain venison, the clouds of a terrible war were steadily gathering to sweep at last in a bloody storm along the entire frontier. CHAPTER II boone's first campaign LATE in the summer of 1754, or about the time Squire Boone and his family were beginning to feel at home in their new surroundings, startHno; news reached the settlers of the Yadkin Valley. The French, it seemed, had come down from Canada into the Ohio country, and had built forts there, notwithstanding that England laid claim to all that territory. Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, the colony most interested in sustaining the English claim, — since, indeed, it had a claim of its own to the Ohio country, based on the terms of its ancient charter, — had sent troops under a young Virginia officer, George Washington, to build forts for Eng- land and dislodge any Frenchmen that might be found. There had been a short but spirited con- flict. First Washington had surprised, attacked, and defeated a French force. Then he, in turn, had been attacked, overwhelmed by numbers, and compelled to capitulate, being permitted, however, to march his men back to Virginia. To the Yadkin Valley people, and to the English colonists generally,, this sounded very much as though war were inevitable, c 17 1 8 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road The prospect was not altogether displeasing to the younger and more reckless and adventurous set- tlers. But those of mature experience, and particu- larly the dwellers along the border, viewed it with undisguised alarm. They knew only too well the horrors of a war with the French and their Indian allies — the night attack, the sanguinary raid, the scalpings, the torturings, the burnings. And, as the graybeards among them whispered to one an- other, the chances were that the impending strug- gle would outdo in bitterness and violence every- thing that had preceded it. For it would mean more, far more, than the determination of owner- ship of the Ohio Valley — it would determine whether England or France was to be the arbiterof the destinies of America, and whether the colonists of England were to remain forever cooped up in the narrow strip of territory between the mountains and the sea, or should be free to pass the mountains and possess themselves of the glorious and almost unoccupied country that lay beyond. This was the question at issue, a question of pe- culiar interest to us, studying, as we are, the first phase in the territorial expansion of the American people. When young George Washington fired that first shot of the French and Indian War in the gloomy depths of the trans-Alleghany glades, he rang the curtain up on the last act of one of the most Boone*s First Campaign 19 fascinating and tragic dramas of world-history, and a drama that had been in progress long before Washington or any other colonist of Washington's time had seen the light of day. Its opening act — or, more accurately, the prologue to its opening act — dated as far back as the first settlement of America by Englishmen and Frenchmen, and its plot was conditioned from the outset by the radically different motives that brought the English and the French into the New World. The English, in the vast majority of cases, had crossed the ocean to win homes for themselves in a country where they would be free from the crush- ing disabilities — the religious persecutions, political discriminations, and economic inequalities — under which they had labored in their native land. The French had been inspired scarcely at all by the home- building spirit. Desire to amass wealth, love of adventure, and missionary zeal were their great motives. As a consequence, the two peoples acted very differently when they reached America. The English established themselves in compact settle- ments along the coast, and began industriously to till the soil. The French gave themselves to exploring and fur-trading, and dispersed far and wide, making friends of the Indians, trafficking with them, and Christianizing them. In less than a decade after the founding of Quebec, 20 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road a French missionary friar of the Recollet order was laboring among the Lake Huron savages. Only a few years more, and the daring young Norman, Jean Nicolet,had penetrated as far west as Wisconsin. A little later, and before the close of the first half of the seventeenth century, the black-gowned Jesuits were planting the Cross among the Indians of Sault Ste. Marie. In a word, France was rapidly establish- ing a title to the ownership of the vast interior region of the North American continent. All this time the English colonists had made next to no progress so far as territorial expansion was concerned, their "farthest west" as late as 1660 being only a few miles from the coast, in the upper valley of the Connecticut. But, as the authorities in Quebec saw clearly enough, they were rapidly outdistancing the inhabitants of New France in point of population, the increase being at the rate of nearly thirty to one in favor of the English. This meant that, if they continued to increase in the same proportion, it could only be a question of time before they would overflow into territory claimed by France. In fact, there had already been an armed invasion of Arcadia by volunteer soldiers from New England. Louis XIV, king of France, vigorously attacked the problem thus presented to him, dissolving, in 1663, the colonization company that had hitherto mismanaged the affairs of New France and sending Boone's First Campaign 2i out rulers of his own choosing, men who were, like Kins Louis himself, zealous to exalt the fleur-de-lis. Chief among these were the famous Talon and the still more famous Frontenac. Under their leadership there at once began a systematic development of what historians have called the "hinterland movement." It involved nothing less than the exploration and occupation of the entire Mississippi Valley, and the construction of a chain of forts and trading-stations designed to connect the mouth of the Mississippi with the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and to oppose an effectual barrier to the English colonists if they attempted to cross the mountain wall that stretched for hundreds of miles between the coastal strip and the Mississippi country. A beginning, and a magnificent beginning, was made to this ambitious project with the ex- plorations of Marquette and Joliet, La Salle and Tonti, Iberville and Bienville. And at the same time, both to weaken the English and to divert their attention from these inland operations, the rulers of New France embarked on a policy of armed aggression, enlisting the services of Indian allies for a series of murderous border raids. Thus opened in 1689 the memorable Seventy Years' War. You will not find it under that name in the histories, where it is usually treated as a suc- cession of different wars, called respectively King 22 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road William's War, Queen Anne's War, King George's War, and the French and Indian War. All these, however, were parts of one and the same conflict, broken by intermittent truces, such as the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which lasted just long enough for the combatants to recover their breath. Up to the French and Indian War the EngHsh colonists were, in the main, left to fight their battles by themselves — a circumstance which had not a little to do with weakening their attachment to the mother country. But they more than held their own with the French, and steadily extended their settlements closer to the mountain wall, even venturing upon explora- tions in the forbidden country on the other side of it. Finally a day came when the supreme trial of strength could no longer be avoided. In 1748, the year of the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la- Chapelle, a company was organized in Virginia for the express purpose of planting an English colony in the Ohio Valley, and in the same year English settlers raised their cabins on the banks of the Green- brier River in West Virginia, the first of that race to make a home on a west-flowing American stream. At once the French took alarm, and the following year sent a representative, Celoron de Bienville, to traverse the Ohio Valley and take formal possession of it in the name of the king of France, driving out all English settlers and traders encountered by him, Boone's First Campaign 23 and making sure of the allegiance of the native in- habitants. But Celoron's expedition was of little effect, the English traders among the Indian villages of the Ohio paying no attention to his warnings and threats, and the Indians showing themselves for the moment none too well disposed towards the French. The situation was completely changed, however, by the arrival at Quebec of a new governor, the Marquis Duquesne de Menneville, who brought with him the most positive instructions to vindicate the title to the Mississippi Valley claimed by France by virtue of La Salle's discoveries, and of possession as exemplified in the old French trading-stations in the Illinois country and elsewhere. In accordance with these instructions, Duquesne sent out a body of troops to construct and garrison a number of forts along the alleged boundary-Hne between the dominions of the two rival Powers. It was this that had occasioned the expedition commanded by Wash- ington, and it was thus that, after more than half a century of indecisive warfare. Frenchman and EngHsh- man at last stood face to face, conscious that the time had arrived for a fight to the death. All through the winter of 1754-55, following Washington's defeat, there were intimations of the approaching storm. The Ohio Indians, and par- ticularly the Shawnees, showed themselves hostile to the English traders, who promptly took refuge 24 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road in the older settlements east of the mountains. The Indians of the Valley of Virginia, hitherto, as a rule, on friendly terms with the white settlers, became sullen and treacherous, and ultimately withdrew altogether from the valley, to return to it only as frenzied, blood-thirsting raiders. Here and there, along the border, were occasional outbreaks, swift and sudden descents which left a faint, but still significant, trail of blood and ashes. The Yadkin country, where the Boones dwelt, was practically free from such alarms, for it was only at a later date that the Indians of the South took the war-path in the interests of the French. But with reports of murder and rapine coming to them from none too distant quarters, the settlers along the Yadkin awaited anxiously the news of the raising of a punitive ex- pedition strong enough to suppress the pernicious activities of the French and their Indians. Among those most ardently hopeful that such an expedition would soon be organized was Daniel Boone. It is said, in fact, that he was so eager to be up and at the enemy that he hurried to Pennsyl- vania and passed the winter in scout duty on its exposed frontier. This is not impossible, but it is rather unlikely, for it was only on occasions of ex- treme crisis that the frontiersmen of that time were wont to rally to the protection of a remote locality. They were too well aware that at any moment the Boone's First Campaign 25 foe might strike an unexpected blow at their own homes, and they had no fancy to leave their loved ones at the mercy of the painted savage. This, rather than callous indifference to the sufferings of others, is the true explanation of the absence of united action on the part of the people of the border in times of war — although, it is proper to add, it scarcely suffices to explain the dissension manifest among the colonists generally from the beginning to the end of the Seventy Years' War, and at all times handicapping greatly the operations against the French. Nor does it altogether explain why North Carolina, when the call finally came for volunteers to aid in avenging Washington's defeat and driving the French back to Canada, sent a scant hundred men to represent her, under the command of Cap- tain Edward B. Dobbs, son of the governor of the province.^ With this North Carolina contingent went Daniel Boone. He was then less than twenty-one years old, and was probably the youngest among the entire ^ It has been quite generally believed that there were two com- panies from North Carolina in the Braddock expedition, one under Dobbs, and another under Captain Hugh Waddell, but as Mr. G. A. Ashe has shown in his recently published "History of North Carolina," Waddell's company did not join Braddock, but served as a guard along the North Carolina frontier. 26 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road hundred, nearly all of whom were backwoodsmen like himself. By forced marches the little regiment made its way northward until, some time in May, 1755, it arrived at Fort Cumberland, which had been built only the previous autumn at the juncture, in western Maryland, of Wills Creek and the Potomac River. It was from this point that the punitive expedition planned to march against the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne, at the forks of the Ohio, where Pittsburg stands to-day. Although the distance from Fort Cumberland to Fort Duquesne was only eighty miles as the crow flies, the way led through an almost trackless wilder- ness of mountain and forest, river and swamp, so difficult that the French were confident the EngHsh could never traverse it. They did not take into their reckoning the com- mander chosen to lead the expedition against them, a typical English bull-dog named Edward Braddock, a soldier of many European campaigns, of a brutal and domineering disposition, but conceded even by his enemies to be a man of dauntless courage. General Braddock had been despatched from Eng- land with two regiments — the Forty-fourth and the Forty-eighth — for the special purpose of establish- ing English sovereignty in the valley of the Ohio, and he had already given signal proof of his masterfulness by the way in which he succeeded in wringing troops Boone's First Campaign 27 • and supplies from reluctant colonial authorities.^ His one great defect was a stubborn self-will, so extreme as to render him deaf to suggestions, im- movable in his own beliefs and decisions, and in- capable, as was fatally demonstrated, of knowing when he was beaten. It was also unfortunate — though not at all ex- ceptional, for the feeling was shared by almost every English officer who played any prominent part in the French and Indian War — that he betrayed an open contempt for the colonial troops. Besides the two regiments of regulars and a detachment of marines, his wilderness army eventually included volunteers from New York, Maryland, Virginia (four hundred and fifty picked marksmen, under Washington), and the Carolinas. Of these he spoke and wrote in most slighting terms, lamenting that ^ Until recently it has been customary to sneer at Braddock and abuse him unsparingly, placing at his door all responsibility of the crushing defeat in the Turtle Creek ravine. But modern re- search has made it clear that had it not been for colonial back- wardness in cooperating with him, history might have had an altogether different story to tell. Explicit instructions had been sent by the Home Government, requiring the raising of troops and money, the procuring of supplies, and the opening of roads, prior to Braddock's arrival in America. So little attention was paid to these instructions that Braddock was obliged to organize the ex- pedition practically single-handed. This meant a loss of much valuable time. 28 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road their ** slothful and languid disposition renders them very unfit for military service." Naturally, lan- guage such as this — and the volunteers doubtless heard its equivalent in blunter phraseology — would not tend to make him a popular commander; nor v^ould the severity v^ith v^hich he drilled them, day after day, in the open space about Fort Cumberland. Still, being fair-minded men, they unquestionably would set down to his credit his evident desire to make the expedition a success in every particular; and they also would not overlook the fact that he had paid them the compliment of selecting the popular young George Washington as one of his chief staff officers. Besides they saw clearly enough that, whatever his faults, Braddock was of fighting stuff, and could be depended upon to satisfy their desire to come to close grips with the French. So that it is likely they took a more favorable view of him than many who did not know him at all have since done. At any rate, they responded with alacrity when, early in June, the command was given to break camp and begin the march to Fort Duquesne. It is not necessary to enter into the details of this journey across the mountains, by a path so narrow that a regiment of engineers and woodchoppers had to lead the way and build a road which in after years, under the name of "Braddock's Road," was to become one of the great arteries of communication Boone's First Campaign 29 between the East and the early West. What Is of importance, from our point of view, is to note that Daniel Boone, instead of being allowed to accom- pany his North Carolina comrades, was compelled to follow humbly in the rear of the long, winding procession, having been assigned to the duties of a wagoner and mechanic, on the strength of his blacksmithing experience. This was not making war as he had dreamed of making it. Yet it had its compensations. Not the least of these was the opportunity it gave him for long talks with men who, as hunters or traders, had an intimate knowledge of the Indian country beyond the mountains through which Brad- dock's column was slowly toiling. Most of all he took pleasure in the astonishing tales of a certain John Finley, who, for the sake of barter with the savages, had visited their villages on the Ohio, and had even penetrated into regions more remote. To Boone's eager demand whether good hunting was to be had, Finley replied that the hunting there, particularly in the country south of the Ohio, was the best in the world. Two years before, he then explained, he had visited this country, and had found it a second Garden of Eden, blessed with the richest of soils and the balmiest of climates, with noble forests and luxuriant expanses, where thousands of buffalo and 30 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road other big game browsed. The Indians called this wonderful country *' Kentucky/' and preserved it as a hunting-ground nominally open to all. So bitter, though, were the tribal animosities and jealousies that as often as not hunting-parties were transformed into war-parties at a moment's notice, and Kentucky became the scene, not of a hunt, but of a battle. Hence, for all its beauty, it was a dark and bloody land, and one where the white man would instantly be deemed an interloper. Finley himself, it appeared, had been obHged to return to the settlements sooner than he desired, because of the evident resentment of the Indians at his having dared to visit Kentucky. Fascinated, Boone absorbed his companion's word-pictures. Neither of them realized that, as they trudged along side by side, or chatted together in the quiet of the evening, they were making history of a world-wide interest. Not for a moment did they dream that their chance meeting in Braddock's ill-starred campaign was to be the means of bring- ing one of them imperishable renown. They only knew that they had taken a warm liking to each other, and that in Kentucky they had found a theme of mutual interest. Both of them were young, con- fident, and high-spirited. The daring of Boone found counterpart in the Scotch-Irish ardor of Finley. And thus it came about that from discussing Kentucky they passed to planning a journey to it. Boone's First Campaign 31 From North Carolina, Finley told Boone, it could be reached by an Indian trail that ran northwestward until it left the mountains at Cumberland Gap. There was yet another route by canoe down the Ohio River to the mouth of a stream which itself bore the name of Kentucky and watered the delectable land. Perhaps after the French had been driven from Fort Duquesne they might find opportunity to voyage to Kentucky by the river route. In this, however, as they were all too soon made aware, they were doomed to bitter disappointment. The farther Braddock's expedition advanced, the slower its progress became, until the stern-faced backwoodsmen themselves began to fear that the goal would never be reached, and that the confidence of the French in the inaccessibility of their position would be justified. But Braddock, bull-dog Brad- dock, refused to turn back. For once, though, he listened to the advice of others, and on Washington's suggestion split his column in two, leaving the less able-bodied troops to act as a reserve. Thus reHeved, he again pushed towards Fort Duquesne, but still at so slow a pace that Washington, burning with impatience as well as with a fever which had for a time totally incapacitated him, afterwards com- plained that instead of proceeding vigorously "they were halting to level every mole-hill, and to erect 32 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road bridges over every brook, by v^hich means we v^ere four days in getting tv^elve miles." Nevertheless, the very fact that he was able to advance his troops the tv^elve miles, was sufficient proof that Braddock was accomplishing what many had declared to be impossible. In Fort Duquesne the news of his approach caused great dismay. Expected reenforcements had failed to arrive, and the commandant, Contrecceur, could see no way to avoid a surrender, especially after the discovery that his Indians were panic-stricken at the enemy's successful passage of the mountains. There was no use, he told himself, in offering resistance; he would simply be overwhelmed. Thoroughly despondent, he shook his head hope- lessly when one of his young captains, a daredevil named Beaujeu, asked leave to take troops and Indians, and make a last-ditch stand against the English, then less than ten miles from the fort. The Indians, Contrecceur feared, would not lend their aid, and he had no wish to see his garrison cut to pieces. But Beaujeu was as shrewd as he was brave. Donning savage costume, painting himself, and throwing an Indian gorget about his neck for good luck, he visited the encampment where the red men were gloomily awaiting the capitulation. "Brothers," cried he, "I am told that you refuse Boone's First Campaign 33 to march with me against the enemy. But I will face the foe, even if I must go alone. And that, I know, you will never suffer. Come ! Up and follow me ! " For a moment, silence. Then a mad outburst of shouts and cheers. If it be true, as has been said, that the great Ottawa war lord, Pontiac, was at Fort Duquesne that day, there is no need to seek further for the first chieftain to respond to Beaujeu's gallant appeal. Headlong down the narrow trail to the Monon- gahela the young captain raced at top speed, fol- lowed by a motley host of Indians, Canadians, and French regulars, some eight hundred in all. It was then high noon of the 9th of July. Between two and three o'clock on the upland trail in the midst of the Turtle Creek ravine, they encountered the English. Beaujeu, coming unexpectedly on Braddock's engineers, who were busy at their road-building, stopped short and waved his hat. Instantly the Indians, leaping to this side and that, buried them- selves in the dense thickets that encumbered the trail. Then, as the retreating engineers and the advancing main body of the English came together in a confused mass on the narrow trail, the rain of bullets began — thick, fast, deadly. In vain Braddock tried to form his men for a 34 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road charge that should clear the underbrush of the hid- den foe. The first attack had completely disorgan- ii^ed his regulars; while the colonial troops, skilled Indian fighters all, had instinctively broken ranks and begun fighting from cover. Braddock's men, falling Hke leaves in an autumn gale, sought to profit by their example; but Braddock himself, notwith- standing the expostulations of Washington, beat them back into the open with the flat of his sword, vainly urging them to form and charge. He was demanding the unattainable. Time and again, in Httle squads that offered a splendid target to the French and Indian marksmen, the redcoats plunged into the ravine, many of them never more to retrain the trail. Beaujeu had fallen almost at the first fire, but now there were many eager to take his place, and the allies did not lack for leadership. Braddock, for his part, was here, there, and everywhere, until at last he too dropped with a mortal wound. Sir Peter Halket, second in command, lay dead, with the corpse of his son lying across his own. Still the rain of bullets continued, and still the doomed army battled magnificently in a vain effort to stave off the inevitable. When, however, late in the after- noon, the retreat was ordered, a natural reaction set in; and, seized with an insane panic, the survivors fled back to the reserves. Boone*s First Campaign 35 Beyond the Monongahela, which was recrossed by but a pitiful fraction of the advance colurnn, there was no pursuit; but still they fled. And, their terror infecting the reserves, the panic grew, until finally all the remnants of Braddock's beaten- army were in full flight, stumbHng and staggering along the rugged road towards the protecting stockade of Fort Cumberland. What Daniel Boone was doing all this time, we have no means of knowing. But now, for a moment, we catch a glimpse of him among the fugitives, on the back of one of his wagon-horses, galloping at top speed. It was hardly a glorious ending to his first campaign, and his bitterness and chagrin can readily be imagined. Yet he would have found ample con- solation could he but have pierced the veil of the future and beheld the notable events, growing directly or indirectly out of this disastrous experience, in which he was to fill the leading role. CHAPTER III DARK DAYS ON THE BORDER THE immediate result of Braddock's defeat was to expose the frontier to all the horrors of In- dian warfare. Colonel Dunbar, who had suc- ceeded to the command, in the face of frantic protests by the frontiersmen of Virginia, Maryland, and Penn- sylvania, hurried his surviving regulars from Fort Cumberland to comfortable quarters in Philadelphia, and left the savage allies of the French at liberty to harass and plunder the outlying settlements. Only George Washington, then as ever a heroic figure in the annals of the country, remained to organize the unhappy border folk into some semblance of an effective military force. Braddock's Road, which it had been so fondly hoped would prove a highway to the mastery of the Ohio Valley, now formed a dread line of communi- cation between the victorious French and the help- less settlers. At an early day following the disaster in the ravine, the commandant of Fort Duquesne could truthfully report that he had destroyed the border settlements over a tract of country thirty leagues wide, reckoning from the line of Fort Cum- 36 Dark Days on the Border 37 berland, and that the villages of his Indians were full of prisoners. Even in the extreme South — that is, in the Caro- linas and Georgia — there were rumors that the native tribes, and more especially the Cherokees, were growing restive, and were Hkely to take the war-path at any time. This led to the building of several stockaded forts of the type which Mr. James Lane Allen has aptly called "rustic castles." Both rustic and castle-Hke they looked, with their stout, sharply pointed, twelve-foot palisades and their three-storied blockhouses. One, Fort Prince George, stood on the upper waters of the Savannah River, near its source; another. Fort Loudon, on the Little Tennessee, about thirty miles from the present town of Knoxville; a third. Fort Dobbs, not far below the forks of the Yadkin. These three forts guarded the approach from the southwest, and all of them were garrisoned to a fair strength. After which, the Southern borderers quietly awaited the develop- ment of events. Soon, nothing untoward occurring, they resumed their pastoral mode of life, cultivating their farms and herding their sheep and cattle as usual. To this the Yadkin Valley settlers, Daniel Boone among them, — for he had returned home immediately after the fatal ending of the Braddock campaign, — proved no exception. Boone himself, with an un- 38 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road wonted energy and steadfastness, lent a hand in the daily tasks of his father's farm, ploughing, seed- ing, and harvesting with the utmost dihgence. For the present, chastened by his experiences with Brad- dock, he had lost all disposition to roam, and if he still secretly cherished the dreams that had been in- spired by Finley's romantic stories, he rigorously subdued them. Besides, he was now urged to earnest effort by the greatest of human motives, for he had fallen in love. In the Yadkin settlements, at the forks of the Yadkin, and thus quite near the Boone homestead, lived a Scotch-Irish family of Bryans, a simple, primitive people, of strong passions and big hearts. Among the younger Bryans was a black-eyed, rosy- cheeked lass named Rebecca, who made a conquest of Daniel Boone almost at first sight. She was only fifteen when they plighted their troth, and but two years older when Daniel's father, in his capacity of justice of the peace, read the service that made them man and wife. For a time they found a home in a rude cabin on the Boone farm, but before long Daniel set up a cabin of his own on land a few miles distant. Here, the following year, a son, James, was born to them ; and two years afterwards another son, whom they named Israel. Meanwhile the proud husband and father toiled like the proverbial beaver, sowing and reaping his Dark Days on the Border 39 crops, raising livestock, hunting wild animals for the sake of their meat and furs, and occasionally adding to his always meagre income by serving as a wagoner in one of the caravans that from time to time wound through the foot-hills to the markets of the coast, where the backwoods products were exchanged for salt and iron and other necessaries. Some smithing he did also, and possibly took his turn at the loom, as he had done in the by-gone days of his boyhood in Pennsylvania. Thus he passed his time, happily and hopefully, if laboriously, until the early spring of 1759, the year which before its close witnessed the historic battle on the Plains of Abraham, when Wolfe, by the conquest of Quebec, sounded the death-knell of French authority in America. All through the winter there had been signs that the Carolina frontiers could not expect much longer to escape the fury of the Indians. In 1758 the Cherokees, instigated by French emissaries and also influenced by a well- grounded fear that the EngHsh intended some day to possess themselves of the tribal lands on the Little Tennessee, had gone raiding in the Valley of Virginia with deadly results. In April, 1759, they forced an entrance into the fertile Yadkin and Catawba valleys, destroyed crops, burned cabins, murdered settlers, and dragged their wives and children into a cruel captivity. 40 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road So sudden and severe was the blow that the stricken people had no opportunity to rally for an organized resistance, much less undertake an offensive cam- paign. Abandoning their farms, they hastened for shelter to the strong stockade of Fort Dobbs, or to hurriedly constructed ''houses of refuge"; or else, if they could possibly find the means to do so, fled with all their belongings to the settlements in the tide-water country. This was the course followed by the Boones, or at least by Squire Boone, his son Daniel, and their respective families. Squire, it is said, went to Maryland. Daniel took Rebecca and their infant children to eastern Virginia, where he found employment at his old occupation of wagoner. It was not in his nature, however, to remain in a stranger's land, and leave to others the task of defending his hearth and home. So soon as he had satisfied himself that his little family would not be exposed to want, he returned to the border, where he found thrilling events in progress. The Cherokees had laid a desperate siege to Fort Dobbs, but had been gallantly beaten off by its garrison under the command of Colonel Hugh Waddell, one of the foremost Indian fighters of his day. They had then renewed their depredations in small war-parties, ultimately gathering in force to attack Fort Prince George. In the meantime a British army officer, Colonel Dark Days on the Border 41 Montgomery, had organized a strong punitive ex- pedition. It included two regiments of regulars, fresh from their victories in Canada, and several hundred Carolina backwoodsmen, led by Waddell. With Waddell went Daniel Boone. A swift march to Fort Prince George resulted in its instant relief, and the destruction of a number of Cherokee villages in the country round about it. At one of these. Little Keowee, the troops effected a night surprise, and tradition has it that not one of the warriors found there was left aHve. Then Montgomery hurried his soldiers across the mountains, resolved to deal a decisive blow to the more important Indian towns on the Little Tennessee. But he had underestimated the desperate valor of the Cherokees, now fighting for their very existence. Although the English column was almost two thou- sand strong, they did not hesitate to lay an ambush for it. Beneath the fragrant laurels and behind the mossy rocks of a steep mountain road they hid themselves, while their spies kept them constantly informed of the approach of the unsuspecting soldiers. Not a rifle cracked, not a war-whoop was heard until the invaders were well within the trap set for them. Then, at a signal, a sheet of flame burst from the verdant roadside, and exultant shouts from six hundred savage throats went echoing down the narrow gorge. 42 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road It was a complete surprise — far more of a sur- prise than that experienced by poor Braddock. But, rallying his men, many of whom had fallen dead or wounded at the first volley, Montgomery fought bravely for a full hour. The Indians, no less brave, and having the advantage of knowing every inch of the ground, were not to be shaken off, but hung hke leeches to the flanks of the stricken column, which at last was forced to retreat back to Fort Prince George, dogged every step of the way by the triumphant and vindictive Indians. Nothing but the poor marksmanship of the Cher- okees, and the courageous rear-guard defence of Waddell's borderers, averted a disaster comparable with that sustained by Braddock. As it was, Mont- gomery lost twenty men killed and seventy-six badly wounded; and, abandoning all thought of further chastising the savages, marched his regulars from Fort Prince George to Charleston, whence he pres- ently embarked with them for New York. Once more the frontier of Georgia and the Carolinas lay at the mercy of the copper-colored foe. But instead of following up this advantage, and immediately plundering and ravaging as before, the Cherokees first of all turned their attention to the conquest of Fort Loudon, which stood a solitary Enghsh outpost in the very heart of the Cherokee country and one hundred and fifty miles from the Dark Days on the Border 43 nearest white settlement. For some weeks the gar- rison, which numbered in all two hundred regular soldiers, made a determined resistance; but the surrender of the fort was ultimately forced by the failure of the food supply. It was stipulated that the soldiers should be allowed to march out under arms, and proceed unmolested to Fort Prince George or to the Virginia settlements, whichever they pre- ferred. Nevertheless, when only fifteen miles from Fort Loudon, they were attacked by the Cherokees, and either killed or taken prisoner. Accounts differ as to the loss of Kfe, the estimates ranging from thirty to two hundred slain. Whatever the exact figure, this most treacherous massacre proved the undoing of the Cherokees, for it aroused the colonial authorities to the necessity of taking drastic measures to stem the Indian tide that now threatened to engulf every outlying settle- ment. A joint invasion of the Cherokee country was decided on by the governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and by June of 1761 two armies were on the march. One, consisting chiefly of Scotch regulars and South Carolina militia, and commanded by a Highlander, Colonel James Grant, advanced against the towns on the Little Tennessee by way of Fort Prince George. The other approached the same destination from the north, and was composed of Virginia and North 44 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road Carolina backwoodsmen under Colonels Byrd and Waddell. In this second army Boone again found a place, serving once more under the valiant Waddell. But he was destined on this occasion to witness little or no fighting, for Grant anticipated Byrd and Wad- dell in meeting the Cherokees, whom he fought on the very battle-ground where Montgomery had been so disastrously repulsed the previous year. Establishing themselves on a hill, the Indians for three hours successfully resisted every attempt at dislodgment, and at the same time numbers of them harassed the army by a galling fire from the bushes and rocks. For a while it almost seemed as though their bravery would be rewarded with another victory. But at eleven o'clock — the engagement having begun at eight in the morning of June 1 1 — they suddenly gave way, and a running battle followed until two in the afternoon with little damage to either side. All told, indeed, the loss to the whites was only between fifty and sixty men killed and wounded, while the Indians suflFered little more severely. Still the battle was in the truest sense a "decisive" one. It taught the Cherokees that their only safety lay in making peace as quickly as possible. Submitting to Grant, they submitted also to Byrd and Waddell, and after some tedious negotiations a treaty of am- ity was signed on Nov. 19. By its provisions the Cherokees were to remain in possession of their Dark Days on the Border 45 ancestral lands, and were to cease from troubling the whites for all time to come — or, to put it in the poetic phraseology of Indian treaty makers, they were to '' keep the chain of friendship bright so long as rivers flow, grasses grow, and sun and moon endure." It was a noteworthy treaty, ending a noteworthy war. Hewatt and Ramsay and other early his- torians have described this struggle between the Cherokee and the CaroHnian as one among "the last humbling strokes given to the expiring power of France in North America." It was that, and it was more, since it had an important bearing on the opening up of the unoccupied country west of the mountains. As has been stated. Fort Loudon was situated one hundred and fifty miles in advance of the nearest white settlement. Between it and the Carolina borders lay a difficult but fertile expanse of mountain and valley practically unexplored prior to the Cherokee War. The successive campaigns of Montgomery, Grant, Byrd, and Waddell revealed this territory in all its richness, proved that it was not so inaccessible as had generally been supposed, and aroused in many frontiersmen the desire to make their homes in a region where nature's gifts were so bountiful. Consequently, after the signing of the Cherokee Treaty, and the more far-reaching Treaty of 1763, by which France formally relinquished her American 46 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road claims, there was great activity along the southwest frontier. Settlements became more numerous in the Valley of Virginia and the Piedmont section of the Carolinas, there was a constant edging westward by the more daring pioneers, and hunting parties for the first time penetrated the mountain fastnesses in which the buffalo and bear and deer had taken refuge from the oncoming wave of civilization. In this mid-mountain hunting no one was so con- spicuous as Daniel Boone. The Cherokee cam- paigning had reawakened all his latent passion for adventure, and although he brought his family back to the Yadkin as soon as peace had been made sure, he found it impossible to resume the humdrum Hfe of the stay-at-home farmer. More than ever he relied on the products of the chase to supply him with a livelihood, and since game had become scarce in the Yadkin Valley, he of necessity, as well as choice, embarked on long and perilous hunting-trips. As early as 1760 he was threading his way through the Watauga wilds, where the first settlement in Tennes- see was afterwards estabHshed.^ In 1761, at the head of a hunting-party which crossed the Alleghanies that year, "came Daniel Boone from the Yadkin, ^ Until a few years ago there stood on the bank of Boone's Creek, a tributary of the Watauga River, a beach tree bearing on its time- incrusted bark a hunting-knife inscription which testified that *' D. Boon cilled a bar on this tree in the year 1760." Dark Days on the Border 47 in North Carolina, and travelled with them as low as the place where Abingdon now stands, and there left them." Three years later he was once more in the Ten- nessee country. It was on this occasion that he is reported to have cried, while gazing from a Cumber- land Mountain peak at a herd of buffalo grazing below: "I am richer than the man mentioned in scripture, who owned the cattle on a thousand hills — I own the wild beasts of more than a thousand valleys ! '' In the following year — 1765 — he actually carried his explorations as far south as Florida, and almost made up his mind to settle at Pensacola. Had he done so, the chances are that nothing more would have been heard of him. Assuredly, he would never have won fame as the great pilot of the early West. But, dissuaded by his wife, he abandoned this plan, and once more gave himself whole-heartedly to the pursuit of the big game of the mountain ranges. Sometimes he took with him his oldest son, James, then a boy of eight. More frequently he journeyed in absolute solitude, pressing restlessly forward on the trail of the retreating beasts of prey. Always, he noted, this led him towards the west; and ere- long there recurred to his mind the glowing tales he had heard from the trader Finley in the sad days of Braddock's campaign. It must be to Kentucky, the hunter's paradise, that the wild animals were 48 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road fleeing. He had vowed to visit Kentucky. Nov^, if ever, while the Indians were at peace with the whites, was the time to fulfil that vow. But, as he soon discovered, it was no easy matter to reach Kentucky. In the autumn of 1767 he made his first start, accompanied by a friend named Hill and, it is thought, by his brother, Squire Boone, named after their brave old father who had died two years before. The route followed was from the Yadkin to the valleys of the Holston and Clinch, and thence to the head waters of the West Fork of the Big Sandy. Boone's plan was to strike the Ohio, and follow it to the falls of which Finley had told him. But they had only touched the eastern edge of Ken- tucky when they were snow-bound and compelled to go into camp for the winter. Attempting to renew their journey in the spring, they found the country so impenetrable that they soon abandoned all idea of entering and exploring it by that route, and made their way back to the Yadkin, laden with the spoils of the winter's hunting. Whether, if left to himself, Boone would again have endeavored to find a way into Kentucky, there is no means of knowing. But just at this juncture, and guided, it would seem, by the finger of Fate, there unexpectedly appeared in the Yadkin Valley the one man best calculated to hold him to his pur- pose — the trader, John Finley. CHAPTER IV BOONE's explorations in KENTUCKY WITH the advent of John Finley in the Yad- kin Valley that part of Boone's career which really belongs to history may be said to have begun. He was then in his thirty-fifth year, and, as the reader will have perceived, had as yet done little in the way of actual achievement. Two of the three military campaigns in which he had taken part had been miserable failures, and for the rest his Hfe had been spent in a desultory way, diflFer- ing only in degree from that of hundreds of other young borderers. Yet his roaming and hunting, his incessant wan- dering, and his attentive studying of the ways of nature had constituted the best of apprenticeships for his future labors. And it is precisely because of this that such emphasis has been laid in the preceding pages on the events of what may fairly be called his probationary period. He found Finley enthusiastic as ever with regard to Kentucky, and entirely willing to act as guide to an exploring party. It was then too late in the year to attempt to cross the mountains, but Boone prom- ised himself an early start with the coming of spring, E 49 50 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road and at once began to seek among his neighbors for fellow-travellers. In this he had the efficient co- operation of Finley, who remained on the Yadkin all winter as Boone's guest, and contrived to make the long winter evenings pass most pleasantly with stories of his own adventures in the forests and cane- brakes of Kentucky. Added to the effect of such tales, from the standpoint of securing volunteers for the enterprise, was the fact that the dwellers along the Yadkin, in common with many of their fellow- settlers throughout the Piedmont region of North Carolina, were growing restless and discontented under conditions which presently led to an outbreak of civil war. There had been a rapid increase in population since the close of the Cherokee War, and with the newcomers had appeared not merely the farmer and hunter and trader but also the tax-collector. Cor- rupt officials and cunning lawyers preyed upon the simple frontiersmen until, driven to desperation by a sense of wrongs which the courts seemed unwilling to correct, the men of the border united in an armed protest known in history as the War of the Regula- tion. This is not the place to give a narrative of its tumultuous events,^ but it is important to recognize ^ The most authoritative and scholarly account of the War of the Regulation is contained in Professor John S. Bassett's "The Regulators of North Carolina," a monograph published as part of Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 51 the influence it exercised on the opening up of the West. It made men eager to hazard the perils of the remote wilderness, in preference to remaining in settled communities where injustice was rampant. Especially did it contribute to the first settlement of Tennessee. And, although its crisis had not been reached at the time of Finley's sojourn with Boone, the situation had become sufficiently acute to account for the readiness with which volunteers stepped for- ward in response to Boone's appeal. Among those offering their services was Boone's brother, Squire. It was wisely determined, however, that he should remain at home to harvest his own and Daniel's crops, and should then follow them across the mountains with fresh horses and an ad- ditional supply of ammunition. As finally selected the exploring party included Finley, Boone, a brother- in-law of Boone's named John Stuart, and three other Yadkin settlers, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and WiUiam Cooley. All six were resolute, hardy men, expert shots, and equal to every emergency. With the exception of Finley, it is believed that they were all men of family, but there is nothing to show that their wives raised any objection to their departure on a journey the annual report of the American Historical Society for 1894. Professor Bassett gives references to the earlier, and mostly par- tisan, literature on the subject. 52 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road which, under the most favorable conditions, was certain to prove more or less perilous. They were true border women, at a moment's notice capable of "playing the man for their people." They relied impUcitly on their husbands' good judgment, and were ever ready to adopt any course of action that promised to mitigate the hardships of frontier existence. On the 1st of May, 1769 — a truly memorable May Day in the annals of American exploration — the start was made from the Yadkin.^ Each man was mounted on a good horse, and led a second horse equipped with that useful if rude contrivance, the pack-saddle. Each was well armed, and dressed in the regulation garb of the frontiersman — deer- ^ It should be clearly understood that Boone was by no means the first white man to enter Kentucky. As has been said, Finley had visited it in 1752, and possibly again in 1767. And it was visited by white men long before Finley's day. There is even reason to believe that it was entered and partially explored as early as 1671 by a company of Virginians under Captain Thomas Batts. La Salle was another seventeenth-century visitor to Kentucky. A French expedition is reported to have been at Big Bone Lick in 1735, and seven years afterwards two Virginians, John Howard and Peter Sailing, likewise anticipated Boone, as did Dr. Thomas Walker in 1748. It was Boone's distinction, however, to obtain a more thorough knowledge of the country than did any of his pred- ecessors, and to be the first man to turn that knowledge to prac- tical account. If not the first in point of time, he was the first explorer of Kentucky in the true meaning of the term. Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 53 skin shirt and trousers, light cap and moccasins, and belt bristling with tomahawk, hunting-knife, powder-horn, and bullet-pouch. Picturesque, indeed, they must have looked, as they turned in their saddles, to wave a farewell, and then disappeared, one after another, at a bend in the road. Overhead, the sun beamed down upon them with the genial warmth of spring; beneath, babbling merrily away in a blossom-hidden gorge, a moun- tain brook cheerily wished them good luck; while all about them a companionable whispering came from the forest trees, fresh and lusty in their new garbs of green. As the travellers may well have told one another, it was a glorious morning for the com- mencement of a glorious enterprise. But much of gloom and rigor lay before them. Not many miles, and they were compelled to turn from the beaten road and follow winding, scarcely discernible Indian paths along the ridges and through the valleys of the North Carolina mountains. And soon history itself loses sight of them. Boone, in the curious "autobiography" which the first Kentucky historian, John Filson,^ wrote for him, simply says ^ An interesting character in the annals of Kentucky and Ohio. He was one of the founders of Cincinnati, to which he gave the curious name of Losantiville. In 1788, while on a surveying ex- pedition, he was killed by Indians. His name is perpetuated in the celebrated "Filson Club," the Kentucky organization devoted to 54 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road that "after a long and fatiguing journey through a mountainous wilderness, in a westward direction," they found themselves on the Red River in Kentucky. From other sources it is gathered that their route lay across the Blue Ridge and Stone and Iron moun- tains, and through the valleys of the Holston and the Clinch into Powell's Valley, where they discovered Finley's promised trail through Cumberland Gap, and, following it, came at last into Kentucky. Once there, they quickly realized that it was all that Finley had painted it. "We found everywhere," Boone told Filson, "abundance of wild beasts of all sorts. The buffalo were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these exten- sive plains, fearless, because ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing." And, according to Filson, he added in a rhapsody of enthusiasm : — " One day I undertook a tour through the country, and the diversity and beauties of nature I met with . . . expelled every gloomy and vexatious thought. Just at the close of day the gentle gales retired, and left the place to the disposal of a profound calm. Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had research in the early history of that State, and to whose publica- tions all students of American history are greatly indebted. Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 55 gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below. On the other hand I surveyed the famous river Ohio, that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boun- dary of Kentucky w4th inconceivable grandeur. At a vast distance I beheld the mountains Hft their venerable brows, and penetrate the clouds." These, it is as well to point out, are Boone's words only as they have come down to us in the peculiar phraseology of Filson. But they depict accurately enough the profound impression made on the simple frontiersman and his companions by the magnificent scenery of Kentucky and the numerous evidences of its great natural wealth. Journeying leisurely along the so-called "Warriors' Path," — a rough highway opened up by Indian war-parties in their movements back and forth between the Ohio country and the villages of the South, — the explorers before the end of June established a permanent camp on a tribu- tary of the Kentucky River in what is now Estill ^Jounty. Then, being practical men, and having a keen desire to profit as much as possible from their daring venture, they at once started hunting. Swiftly the days passed, and with each succeeding day their store of furs grew larger, so abundant and unwary was the game. The hunter's paradise of their dreams had, in truth, become a reality. But 56 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road they were fated to learn that, as Finley had warned Boone when he first told him about Kentucky, it was not altogether without its evils. Indian " signs'' began to multiply, and more than mere "signs/' It was the custom of the adventurers to hunt singly or in couples, and as a general thing Boone and his brother-in-law, Stuart, paired together. One day they left camp as usual, intending to explore the country along the banks of the Kentucky. All went well until just before sunset when, as they were about to ascend a small hill, they found themselves sur- rounded by a band of Shawnees, who evidently had been watching them for some time from the shelter of a thick cane-brake. They were given no chance to defend themselves, but were seized, hurled to the ground, and pinioned securely. Among the Shawnees was one who could speak a little English, and by him the captives were presently informed that they must guide the Indians to their camp. In the hope, perhaps, that their comrades would effect a rescue they complied, but such was the cunning of the Shawnees that Finley and the rest were taken prisoners as Boone and Stuart had been, without striking a blow. Unable to resist, but pro- testing vigorously, they watched the Indians plunder the camp of everything it held — furs, provisions, horses, traps, rifles, and ammunition. They were told that they were trespassing on land which be- Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 57 longed exclusively to the red men, and which the latter were determined to keep forever as their own; and they were warned that did they venture to set foot in it again, their Hves would pay the penalty. After which, to their infinite relief, they were released, given just enough food to carry them back to the settlements, and ordered to leave Kentucky at once. It was Finley's advice that they should take the hint, and make the best of their way over the moun- tains; and in this Cooley and Mooney and Holden concurred. But Boone and Stuart, infuriated at the idea of returning poorer than they had left home, bluntly refused to flee. They intended, they said, to make an effort to recover their property; and, after a cautious pursuit, they actually succeeded in entering the Shawnee camp and making away with four horses. Two days later, the Shawnees having given chase as soon as they missed the horses, Boone and his brother-in-law were captives once more. There was no talk now of releasing them. On the contrary they were given to understand that they would be taken to the Shawnee villages on the Scioto River, in the Ohio country, and there punished as their temerity and ingratitude deserved. But for the time being they were not treated unkindly, and Boone's active mind was soon revolving projects for escape. In his boyhood, as will be remembered, he had made a careful study of Indian characteristics, 58 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road and his experiences in the Tennessee mountains, during and after the Cherokee War, had rounded out his knowledge so completely that there were few so well equipped as he to outwit the wiliest of sav- ages. Bidding Stuart keep up his courage and do nothing to irritate the Shawnees, Boone strove earnestly to win their confidence. Soon, so artfully did he work upon them, their watchfulness relaxed, and the prisoners were granted an unusual degree of liberty. Thus seven days passed. On the night of the seventh day, having decided that the attempt at escape must be made before crossing the Ohio, Boone waited until he was sure that every Indian in camp had fallen asleep. Then, creeping along the ground so cautiously that not a twig snapped beneath him, he gently aroused Stuart, who, like the Shawnees, was slumbering soundly. Together, and keeping well out of the glow of the camp-fire, the two plucky backwoodsmen secured rifles, bullets, and powder, and, their moccasined feet making never a sound, vanished ghost-like into the darkness of the sur- rounding cane-brake. Meanwhile Finley, Cooley, Mooney, and Holden were homeward bound, convinced that Boone and Stuart had perished in their rash attempt. At the same time Squire Boone, in company with a hunter named Neely, whom he had accidentally encoun- Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 59 tered while crossing the mountains, was hurrying westward along the Warriors' Path, bringing with him horses and supplies, as had been agreed. Not far from Cumberland Gap the two parties met, and Squire learned from Finley the news of the supposed death of Boone and Stuart. It was decided to return East without delay, and East all six would un- doubtedly have gone but for the sudden and wel- come arrival of the two fugitives, who staggered into camp one day, weary and famished and in tatters.^ Exhausted though he was, Boone's spirit remained unbroken. The glamour of the wilderness was full upon him, and moreover he had no desire of return- ing empty-handed after his year on the Kentucky. So soon as he learned of Squire Boone's presence with the new equipment, he declared his intention of hastening back to lay in another store of furs. To this. Squire, scarcely less adventurous than Daniel himself, gave a ready assent; and Neely, too, ex- pressed his cordial approval, as did Stuart. But Finley protested that, for the present, he had had ^ In its essentials this account of Boone's first captivity follows the version given by Dr. Thwaites. It differs in important re- spects from that of earlier writers, but Dr. Thwaites had the advan- tage of being able to utilize the invaluable Draper collection of Boone manuscripts, preserved in the library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, and for that reason his version is to be preferred. 6o Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road enough of Kentucky — the Indians were aroused and angered, and might at any time fall upon them. This was the view of the others, who continued homeward with Finley, while the Boones, Stuart, and Neely were soon afterwards building a new camp not far from the scene of the recent adventure. It would have been well for one of them had he taken Finley's advice and abandoned an enterprise which had thus far proved most unprofitable. As before, Daniel Boone and Stuart hunted together, frequently separating during the day to meet at nightfall at some appointed rendezvous. One even- ing, shortly after their return to the Kentucky, Stuart failed to appear, and he was still missing at sunrise. Boone, greatly alarmed, began a search for him, and before night came upon the embers of a fire not more than a day old. But he could find no other trace of his brother-in- law, and Neely and Squire Boone were equally un- successful when they joined in the hunt. Reluc- tantly it was concluded that Stuart had either been killed by Indians, or had accidentally shot himself. He was too good a backwoodsman, as they were well aware, to lose his way. Five years afterwards, but not until then, the mystery of his disappearance was partially cleared when Boone, while on a hunting- trip in the same vicinity, discovered in a hollow syca- more tree a few human bones and a powder-horn Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 6i marked with Stuart's name. But he did not require this long-hidden evidence to convince him that Stuart had indeed perished — the first, as Roosevelt has put it in his "The Winning of the West," of the thousands of human beings with whose Hfe-blood Kentucky was bought. Soon afterwards Neely started home, satisfied with his share of the winter's hunting. This left the two Boones alone in the wilderness. Only a little later, and but one Boone remained in it — the indomitable Daniel. Their ammunition had become almost exhausted, and they had decided that Squire should go home with the horses, dispose of the furs they had already collected, and return with the means for further hunting. On the first of May, a year to a day since the departure from the Yadkin, Squire silently wrung his brother's hand, swung him- self into the saddle, and set off down the lonesome Warriors' Path. It has been charged that Daniel Boone, in thus electing to hold himself remote from kith and kin, and lead a solitary existence among the Kentucky cane-brakes, displayed a singular lack of human sympathy, and still more a callous disregard for the feelings of his wife and children. As a matter of fact, though not an emotional man he was devotedly attached to his family, and it was out of regard to their interests, as well as in accord with his character- 62 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road istic fondness for the untrammelled life of the forest, that he permitted his brother to travel alone to the Yadkin. Both the Boones had been obliged to go into debt to equip themselves for the expedition; and the furs which Squire took v^ith him would only in part dis- charge their indebtedness. By remaining in Ken- tucky Daniel would save time and money in many ways. He could not, to be sure, do much hunting, for he would have to be careful of his ammunition until Squire returned; but he could keep things ship- shape at the camp, repair rifles, mend traps, and otherwise occupy himself to good purpose. Most important of all, he would have leisure to make extensive explorations during the best season for studying the topography and resources of Ken- tucky. If he had not done so before, Boone had by this time definitely determined to remove his family from North CaroKna to this glorious land of enchant- ment, where, as he phrased it, "a man might have elbow-room and breathing-space." It did not need a prophet to predict that before many years Ken- tucky, although as yet quite unoccupied, would be- come a seat of white settlement. As early as 1754, or the year of Washington's capitulation to the French, pioneer families had ventured across the Alleghanies and estabHshed homes on a river in northwestern Virginia. In the Southwest the limits of white Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 63 habitation had been extended to Powell's Valley, in the shadow of the Cumberland Mountains. The conquest of the French, the growth of population, and the introduction, more especially in the Carolinas, of laws which, if not intrinsically unjust, were ren- dered so by the manner of their enforcement, had all combined to stimulate the trend westward. Boone had no desire to be a laggard in the rear of this move- ment. He preferred to be among its leaders. And accordingly, soon after his brother had left him, he gave himself seriously to the task of selecting a future home. At first, as he afterwards admitted, he felt unut- terably lonely — a circumstance which is itself strong evidence to the falsity of the charge that he was lack- ing in natural affection. "I confess," he told Filson, "I never before was under greater necessity of ex- ercising philosophy and fortitude. A few days I passed uncomfortably. The idea of a beloved wife and family, and their anxiety upon the account of my absence and exposed situation, made sensible impressions on my heart. A thousand dreadful apprehensions presented themselves to my view, and had undoubtedly disposed me to melancholy, if further indulged." But his strong will and the genial influence of the beautiful Kentucky May- time overcame all feehngs of depression. Every day presented some new attraction to him. Whether 64 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road walking through the luxuriant wilds that have since been transformed into the famous Blue Grass region, tracing the course of some broad-flowing stream, or traversing the twilight depths of a primeval forest so thickly leaved that scarce a ray of sunlight filtered through, he found much to occupy his thoughts. Adventures he had in plenty and of a kind to in- crease his knowledge of woodcraft and of the Ind- ians with whom he was later to come so often into conflict. Shawnees, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and other tribesmen wandered near his path. Some- times he found indications that his camp had been visited during his absence, and on such occasions he slept for many nights afterwards in thicket or cane- brake, fearing lest an attempt might be made to sur- prise him. Once he encountered a band of savages and escaped from them only by leaping down a preci- pice into a river and swimming to the opposite bank. Frequently he sighted other bands, but always man- aged to elude them. At least one Indian fell a victim to his skill with the rifle, being shot down while fish- ing in the Kentucky. In his wanderings he travelled as far as the Falls of the Ohio, where he discovered, at the site of the future Louisville, a fur-trade stockade of which Finley had told him. And, no doubt, as he stood there, he thought of his old friend, hopefully antici- pating the day when they should again be hunting Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 65 together in marvellous Kentucky. Perhaps he fancied that Finley might return with Squire, but when Squire did return, towards the end of July, he c'ame alone. ^ He had had an uneventful but most successful journey, had sold the furs at a substantial profit, and brought the good news that Daniel's wife and children were well. The rest of the summer ^ So far as is known Boone and Finley never met after the latter's departure from Kentucky, as recorded above. In fact, with that departure Finley steps off the stage of authentic history. Dr. Thwaites says that after leaving Boone, he went to visit relatives in Pennsylvania, but what became of him afterwards is unknown. I believe, however, that I have possibly succeeded in tracing his subsequent movements to some extent. The records of Lord Dunmore's War in 1774 show that there was a John Finley who volunteered under Captain Evan Shelby from Watauga. This same John Finley took part in the Cherokee wars of 1776-80. And in 1808, when the town of Huntsburg, Ohio, was founded, the first settler, Stephen Pomeroy, found a trader and trapper named John Finley living in a hut on the bank of a creek now known as Finley Creek. This Finley told Pomeroy that he had been with Boone in Kentucky and had fought under Wayne. He enlisted in the War of 181 2, returned to Huntsburg after the war, but about 18 18 left there, removing, it is thought, to Maryland. He was then a very old man. For this information I am indebted to Mr. W. W. King, of Huntsburg, a great-grandson of Stephen Pomeroy. Of course, there is in all this no positive identification, but it seems at least possible that the John Finley of Watauga, the John Finley of Huntsburg, and the John Finley of Boone's expedition were one and the same. F 66 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road and the early fall the brothers spent in hunting and exploring, this time moving in a southwesterly direc- tion into the country between the Green and Cum- berland rivers. Some time in October, Squire again went home, carrying with him many deerskins; but he was back in Kentucky before the end of the year, and there both he and Daniel remained until the following March. Then, having previously met and spent some weeks with a party of Virginia hunters who, it ap- peared, had been for six months and more in different parts of the country west of the Cumberland Moun- tains, the Boones finally broke camp for the return to the Yadkin. As on the outward journey, their route was by way of the Warriors' Path, Cumberland Gap, and Powell's Valley. And in PowelFs Valley, to their surprise and bitter disappointment, they were overtaken by the danger which they had so warily avoided in uncivilized Kentucky. Riding cheerily along, only a few miles from the westernmost settlements, they were captured by a war-party of Northern Indians returning from a raid against Cherokee and Catawba villages, were robbed of their hard-earned pelts and everything else they possessed, and were sent on their homeward way poorer than when the long hunt had first begun, two years before. The Indians could not, however, rob them of the Boone's Explorations in Kentucky 67 knowledge gained concerning the fertile lands be- yond the mountains. Infuriated but not disheart- ened, mingling curses against all red men with fervid vows to return to Kentucky and make good their losses, the brothers hastened to the Yadkin, where, as may be imagined, they found the heartiest of welcomes. And there, for the moment, let us leave them, while we turn to make the acquaintance of the people who, stirred by the reports which they and other adventurers brought home, were soon to burst the mountain barrier and spread themselves through the groves and glades and prairies concealed from view by its craggy heights. CHAPTER V THE PEOPLE WHO FOLLOWED BOONE THE first settlement of the early West — by which is meant the settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee — was essentially the work of the frontier inhabitants of Virginia, North CaroHna, and South Carolina. It differed in important re- spects from the initial colonization of the country, and most of all in being carried through mainly by native-born Americans in whom the dominant racial strain was not English or Dutch or German, or any of the other nationalities which contributed so largely to the settlement of the seaboard colonies. It was none of these — it was Scotch. Yet here, again, a distinction has to be made. For the men who were to the fore in the movement across the mountains, and in the teeth of hardship, privation, and suffering won a foothold for civiHza- tion in the trans-Alleghany wilderness, were in most cases not of direct Scotch extraction. They were the descendants of Scottish people who, many years before, had moved from their native country to Ire- land, settling especially in North Ireland. Meeting 68 The People who followed Boone 69 with persecution, they, or their children and grand- children, had in time migrated from Ireland to the New World, bringing with them a mixture of both Scotch and Irish traits — for which reason, to dis- tinguish them from people of pure Scotch or pure Irish ancestry, writers have called them Scotch- Irish. It is an awkward term, but it seems impos- sible to devise a better. They had representatives in America within a comparatively short time after the colonization of Virginia and Massachusetts, but it was not until the closing years of the seventeenth century and the open- ing of the eighteenth that Scotch-Irish immigration began in earnest. It flowed in, generally speaking, through two ports, Philadelphia and Charleston, and by 1730 had reached considerable proportions. In the one year 1729 nearly six thousand Scotch- Irish entered the port of Philadelphia, and every year for long thereafter saw a constant increase in their numbers. By choice and of necessity, for the lands along the coast were even then rather thickly settled, these late-comers moved inland, forming large if widely scattered communities in the "back counties'* of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Being a restless, enterprising, and aggressive folk, those who located in Pennsylvania got on none too well with the sedate Quakers and phlegmatic Germans who formed the 70 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road bulk of the population in that colony, and in conse- quence they either built their cabins in outlying dis- tricts, or moved southward along the open table-land of the Valley of Virginia . As early as 1736 there were isolated Scotch-Irish famihes in the Valley, and as time passed a strong current of Scotch-Irish immigra- tion set in, journeying from Pennsylvania through the Valley of Virginia, and thence to the hills and meadows of the Piedmont section of North Carolina. Meanwhile, the Scotch-Irish who had come in by way of Charleston likewise moved inland, passing southward to the hill country of Georgia, or north- ward into the CaroHna uplands. In this way, not- withstanding the presence of Enghsh, German, French Huguenot, and other settlers, the Scotch- Irish element by 1750 was sufficiently numerous to give color and tone to the entire frontier as far north as Pennsylvania. The other colonies, too, had quotas of Scotch-Irish, as evidenced by the giving of such names as Londonderry, Dublin, and Antrim to New Hampshire towns; and Orange and Ulster to New York counties. But nowhere did the Scotch- Irish make their presence so strongly felt as on the borders of the CaroUnas and Virginia. There they were indeed the chief factor in develop- ing the institutional life of the country. Like their ancestors, the ancient Scotch Covenanters, who had suffered much for conscience' sake, they were a pro- The People who followed Boone 71 foundly religious people, of the Presbyterian faith. They were also strong believers in the virtue of edu- cation, if only to enable their children to read the Bible for themselves. The schoolmaster was an early adjunct of a Scotch-Irish settlement; and when, for any reason, a schoolmaster was not to be had, the children were taught their letters at their mother's knee. It is true that as a rule their schooHng was of a primitive sort, confined to the rudiments of read- ing, writing, and arithmetic. But this was ample for the needs of the simple Hfe which the vast ma- jority of Scotch-Irish settlers led. Everything about them, in fact, was characterized by a rugged, outright simplicity. In an old and now almost forgotten book — Joseph Doddridge's "Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania" — there is a crude but graphic picture of their customs and man- ners, drawn from life by one of themselves. "Most of the articles in common use," says Doddridge, "were of domestic manufacture. There might have been incidentally a few things brought to the country for sale in a primitive way, but there was no store for general supply. Utensils of metal, except offensive weapons, were extremely rare and almost entirely unknown. The table furniture usually consisted of wooden vessels, either turned or coopered. Iron forks, tin cups, etc., were articles of rare and deli- 72 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road cate luxury. The food was of the most wholesome and primitive kind. The richest meat, the finest butter, and best meal that ever delighted man's palate, were here eaten with a relish which health and labor only know. The hospitality of the people was pro- fuse and proverbial. "The dress of the settlers was of primitive simplic- ity. The hunting-shirt was worn universally . . . and was usually made of Hnsey, sometimes of coarse linen, and a few of dressed deerskin. The bosom of this dress was sewed as a wallet, to hold a piece of bread, cakes, jerk, tow for wiping the barrel of the rifle, and any other necessary for the hunter or warrior. The belt, which was always tied behind, answered several purposes besides that of holding the dress together. In cold weather the mittens, and sometimes the bullet-bag, occupied the front part of it. To the right side was suspended the tomahawk, and to the left the scalping-knife in its leathern sheath. *'A pair of drawers, or breeches and leggins, were the dress of the thighs and legs, and a pair of moc- casins answered for the feet much better than shoes. These were made of dressed deerskin. They were generally made of a single piece, with a gathering seam along the top of the foot, and another from the bottom of the heel, without gathers, as high as the ankle joint. Flaps were left on each side to reach The People who followed Boone 73 some distance up the leg. Hats were made of the native fur; the buffalo wool was frequently em- ployed in the manufacture of cloth, as was also the bark of the wild nettle." Reading this description, one can readily appre- ciate the stir of lively curiosity aroused in Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston whenever a back- country settler "came to town" from his home among the mountains. The women dressed as simply as the men; their garb a linsey gown, which they spun and dyed and fashioned themselves. For head- gear they wore huge sunbonnets, and on their feet moccasins like the men, or else went barefoot, as was largely their custom in the summer. In a word, the Scotch-Irish settler who took possession of the mountain frontier, and thence moved onward to the conquest of the early West, was conspicuously devoid of everything that made for ease and comfort. Remote from the older and more populous communities near the sea, he led his own Hfe, a hard, cheerless existence in many ways. To begin with, enough space had to be cleared in the untrodden forest for the building of the cabin home and the sowing of the first crop of corn. Until this was done, he and his wife and little ones perforce lived in the canvas-covered wagon, prototype of the prairie schooner of later times, which had carried them to the scene of their chosen habitation. And 74 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road when the cabin was raised, with the willing help of neighboring pioneers, the struggle for a livelihood had only commenced. Week in and week out, for years together, the backwoodsman and his wife — no less brave than he, and gladly sharing his unending labors — toiled to extend their area of cultivation, increase their products, and win a few scant comforts for their later years. However poor, they were an ambitious folk, these backwoods people. They had not come into the wilderness to bury themselves, to stagnate, to take life shiftlessly. And thence it was that where all had once been savage waste, tenanted only by the wild beast or the wandering red man, there soon or late arose progressive settlements, each with its church and schoolhouse, its mill and forge. Cut off as he was from ready intercourse with the markets and manufactures of the tide-water country, every backwoodsman necessarily did much besides cultivate his farm. We have seen how Squire Boone and his son Daniel were weavers and blacksmiths as well as farmers. Among the settlers there were also carpenters, coopers, wheelwrights, wagon- makers, rope-makers, wine-makers, tailors, traders, surveyors, teachers. Every settler was of course a hunter, at all events in the days of the first con- quest of the wilds, since he was obliged to depend on game for his meat supply. This taught him The People who followed Boone 75 to be expert with the rifle, and was excellent train- ing for the grim days when he had to use the rifle to withstand the Indian raider. It taught him, too, as every requirement of his laborious existence taught him, to be self-reliant, resourceful, ready to take long chances, and to yield to no obstacle however difficult or dangerous it seemed. Here we approach one of the most important phases of the influence exercised on the backwoods- man by the nature of his environment. Whether he was Scotch-Irish or English or German or French Huguenot, there was bred in him just those char- acteristics which make for an efficient democracy. His struggle with, and conquest of, the wilderness gave him a pronounced individualism; and at the same time his perpetual sense of isolation, and of dangers shared in common by his fellow-pioneers, increased his human sympathy, and invested the backwoods people as a whole with a keener feeling of solidarity than less exposed communities could boast. To put it otherwise, the backwoodsman was the typical "man in the state of nature," depicted by the political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and he vindicated those theorists who maintained that "man in the state of nature" would voluntarily and eff'ectively organize for mutual defence and for the preservation of his "natural rights." To the backwoodsman all men 76 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road were free and equal, and should have due regard to the freedom and equality of their fellows. He further believed that the function of government was to insure universal freedom and equality, and that for this purpose no better form of government could be devised than a government by the people themselves. Hence the readiness with which, to give an illustration, the Scotch-Irish backwoods- men of both North and South Carolina formed "associations" in the time of the Regulation — just previous to the outbreak of the War for Independence — to correct what they viewed as intolerable inter- ference and injustice on the part of the colonial authorities. More impressive still is the example of the back- woodsmen who came together to form the Watauga Association, the first written constitution drawn up and adopted by any community west of the Alle- ghanies. The Watauga country lay in the eastern part of the present State of Tennessee, and com- prised the forest-clad valleys of the Clinch, the Holston, the Watauga, the Nolichucky, and those numerous other streams which eventually unite to form the Tennessee River. Until 1769 this region was without a single white inhabitant. In that year at least one borderer, William Bean, from Virginia, settled with his family on Boone's Creek, a tribu- tary of the Watauga; and it is believed that at I The People who followed Boone 77 about the same time several other families came in from North Carolina. In any event, a steady, if at first insignificant, volume of immigration began in 1770, from Virginia and North and South Carolina.* By 1772 several little settlements, or stations as they were often called, had been established, their population including not a few who afterwards won lasting fame in the history of the early West. Chief among these were James Robertson and John Sevier, the former justly celebrated a& the "Father of Tennessee," the latter the renowned "Nolichucky Jack of the Border/' and the hero, according to his biographer, James R. Gilmore, of thirty-five battles, every one of which was a victory. Both were native- born American borderers, Robertson being of Scotch- Irish lineage and Sevier of Huguenot ancestry. The great majority of the Watauga settlers were Scotch-Irish, and were a plain, substantial, right- minded people. But, as has always been the case in border communities, there were some evil-doers among them — "refugees from justice, absconding debtors, and horse-thieves." Preying both on their fellow-whites and on the Cherokee Indians, whose villages stood to the south of the Watauga country, these scoundrels soon became a great menace to the ^ Mainly, it would seem, from North Carolina, especially after the battle of Alamance, when Governor Tryon so signally defeated the Regulators. 78 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road peace and progress of the settlements. They were literally beyond the pale of the law, for although Watauga was a part of North CaroHna the juris- diction of that colony had not been extended beyond the mountains, and consequently there were no courts or officers of justice to deal with those deserving punishment. The settlers themselves, however, were equal to the emergency, and this without resorting to *' lynch law." Robertson, Sevier, and a few others con- sulted together and decided that, pending the ex- tension of colonial authority, they would form a government of their own. A call was issued for a general convention, and early in the spring of 1772 the settlers met at Robertson's house. The result of their deliberations was the holding of an election at which the people of the different stations chose an assembly of thirteen representatives. The thirteen, in their turn, met and elected five of their number as a committee, or court, clothed with full authority to administer the public business of the community. They were empowered — by "articles of associa- tion," the text of which has unfortunately been lost ^ ^ Our knowledge of the Watauga Association is based chiefly on a petition addressed to the Provincial Council of North Carolina, by John Sevier, in the name of the inhabitants of Watauga. It is printed in J. G. M. Ramsey's "Annals of Tennessee." James Robertson The " Father of Tennessee ' The People who followed Boone 79 — to settle all disputes, enforce law and order, appoint minor officers of justice, and also appoint the officers of the local militia to be organized in accordance with the articles of association. They were to meet at stated intervals as a regularly con- stituted tribunal, and in the performance of their duties were to follow as far as possible the laws of Virginia. This last provision was due to a mistaken belief of the Wataugans that their territory instead of being part of North Carolina was within the limits of Virginia. As thus constituted the government of Watauga would seem, on a surface view, to have been oli- garchic rather than democratic, government by a few rather than government by the people. But such was not actually the case, since the committee of five retained throughout their existence as an ex- ecutive-judicial body a keen appreciation of their status as representatives of the popular will. In 1776, for example, we find Sevier stating in the petition addressed by him, in the name of the Wa- taugans, to the Provincial Council of North Caro- lina : — "Finding ourselves on the frontiers, and being apprehensive that, for the want of a proper legis- lature, we might become a shelter for such as en- deavored to defraud their creditors; considering also the necessity of recording deeds, wills, and doing 8o Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road other public business, we, by consent of the people, formed a court for the purposes above mentioned, taking (by desire of our constituents) the Virginia laws for our guide, so near as the situation of affairs would admit. This was intended for ourselves, and was done by the consent of every individual." The government thus estabHshed endured for more than four years, or until North Carolina, in response to the petition just quoted, annexed Wa- tauga under the name of the District of Washington. It was, of course, a makeshift government, but it bore striking evidence to the intrinsic worth and good sense of its framers. And they, be it remem- bered, were not men trained for the exercise of legislative, executive, and judicial functions. They were not skilled in the formulation of codes, or versed in the intricacies of legal procedure. They were simply backwoodsmen — wielders of the axe and followers of the plough. Yet they displayed an inborn and wonderful capacity for self-government, and a singular ability in devising governmental methods and processes best fitted to meet their needs. Whence they derived this capacity and ability, it is impossible to say fully. But this much may be said — that they owed it in no small measure to the religion which the Scotch-Irish immigrant had brought with him from Ireland. Presbyterianism had become the creed of the border, and Presby- The People who followed Boone 8i terlanism, with its democratic principles of church polity, was emphatically a training school in political science for the humblest layman as well as the best educated clergyman. Here, then, is a foremost Scotch-Irish contribution to the foundation-building of the West; and, for the matter of that, to the growth of the American governmental system as we know it to-day. If for this alone, the Scotch-Irishman of the border back- woods should always be held in honorable remem- brance. Not that he was without his faults. Progressive and thrifty, his thrift sometimes developed into an unpleasant penuriousness. As one of his eulogists has wittily remarked, he kept the Sabbath and all else that he could lay his hands on. To a ready ap- preciation of his political rights he added an almost abnormal tendency to insist on his personal rights. He was over-ready to take offence, and when ag- grieved, fought like a wildcat. Many repulsive pictures of border fights have been preserved, with their eye-gouging and nose-biting, their rough-and- tumble wrestling and kicking. Moreover, the Scotch-Irish backwoodsman's proneness to quarrel and fight was intensified by his love of strong drink. A writer who has made a special study of the Scotch- Irish in colonial North Carolina says that nearly every farm of any size had a distillery attached, and 82 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road that much of the corn grown was marketed in liquid form. He adds : — **A punch bowl and glasses were found among the effects of the Rev. Alexander Craighead, founder of the earliest churches of the Mecklenburg region. Whiskey played a great part on funeral occasions, and especially at * vendues,' when it was supposed to put the buyers in good humor and was charged to the estate disposed of. The tavern on the public road was a famous institution of these early days, and the variety of the liquors sold reminds one of the EngHsh inns that Dickens has portrayed.''^ Still, for all his defects, the Scotch-Irish back- woodsman compels warm admiration. His virtues far outweighed his vices. And it needed a stalwart, rugged, restless, persevering, and fighting people to conquer the wilderness and the savage, and win the West for civilization. If the Scotch-Irish took with them across the mountains their quick temper and the whiskey bottle, they also took the Bible and the spelling-book, an unquenchable devotion to Hberty, splendid courage, and soundly democratic institutions. In the War for Independence they played a noble part, and from that day to the present their descendants have been found zealous in the service of the nation. Scotch-Irish blood has coursed 1 Rev. A. J. McKelway's "The Scotch-Irish of North Carolina," in The North Carolina Booklet, vol. IV. i The People who followed Boone 83 in the veins of many a President of the United States, and of a long hne of Cabinet officers, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Representatives, and State Gov- ernors and Legislators. Great, in truth, is the debt which America owes to the Scotch-Irish of the border. CHAPTER VI WESTWARD ho! WHEN Daniel Boone returned to the Yadkin in the spring of 1771, he fully expected to remove his family to Kentucky within a very short time. But circumstances, the exact nature of which does not appear from the surviving records, so retarded his plans that more than two years passed before he was able to make a start. In all probability the chief cause of delay was the War of the Regu- lation, for, after the battle of Alamance, — which was fought May 16, 1771, — many Regulators abandoned their homes and fled, as already stated, to the Watauga country. This made land cheap in many parts of Piedmont North Carolina, and ren- dered it difficult for Boone to sell his farm, as he was obliged to do in order to equip himself for the journey. In the interval he paid at least two visits to Ken- tucky, and there is reason to believe that on the second of these he definitely selected the site of his future home. From both visits he returned more enthusiastic than ever with respect to the possibilities 84 Westward Ho! 85 of the country beyond the mountains, and so loudly and persistently did he sing its praises that a number of his neighbors, and even distant settlers, became fired with the desire of seeing it for themselves. Thus it happened that when his preparations were at last complete, and he bade farewell to the Yadkin Valley, Sept. 25, 1773, he found himself at the head of a fairly arge caravan, which was to be consider- ably augmented en route by immigrants from the Valley of Virginia and Powell's Valley. It speaks volumes for the courage and hardihood of Rebecca Boone and other women in the party that they unhesitatingly embarked on the long pilgrimage. Little danger was apprehended from the Indians, as the various tribes had been com- paratively quiet since Pontiac's futile uprising of 1763-65 and the subsequent treaties explicitly rec- ognizing the territorial rights of the natives. But in every other respect the journey was certain to prove arduous in the extreme. For the greater part it would have to be made by narrow and brier- choked trails, often precipitous and involving diffi- cult ascents and descents of the successive ridges. This meant that only the absolute necessaries for existence could be transported, and that the women and children as well as the men would have to travel on horseback or afoot. Instead of sleeping com- fortably of nights in the familiar canvas-covered 86 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road wagon, they would be obliged to camp in the open wilderness, sheltered at most by tent-cloth or bed- coverings stretched between upright poles. Their food would be meagre, unless the hunting proved good; and did the weather turn stormy, the hard- ships of the journey would be increased a thousand- fold.^ Yet the emigrants, men and women alike, faced the prospect with buoyant hopefulness. Leading their pack-horses, and driving a few cattle ahead of them, they journeyed cheerfully westward, their immediate destination being PowelFs Valley, where they were to await the home-seekers from that sec- tion and from the more northerly Valley of Virginia. Five families accompanied the Boones, and if every family was as large as Daniel's, the caravan must have been of really imposing dimensions. For, besides James and Israel, the two children whose births have already been noticed, Daniel and Rebecca had by that time been blessed with six sons and daughters, including Susannah, then thirteen years * In another volume, "Woman in the Making of America," I enter in more detail into this phase of the territorial expansion of the United States. It seems to me that the notable part played by women in the growth of the nation has not been sufficiently recognized, and the book to which I refer endeavors in some part to make clear just what the United States of to-day owes to its heroic women of the past. Westward Ho! 87 old; Jemima, eleven; Lavinia, seven; Rebecca, five; Daniel Morgan, four; and John, a mere infant in arms. Until Powell's Valley was reached the journey was without incident. There was no thought that deadly danger lurked ahead — that, in fact, the travellers were now about to undergo an experience so tragic as to postpone for many months the settle- ment of Kentucky. Boone, as had been arranged, went into camp, pending the arrival of the expected additions to his party. At the same time he ordered his son James to ride across country with two other men for the purpose of obtaining extra supplies from a CHnch River settler named Russell. It was not many miles to Russell's place, and the supposition was that the trip there and back could be made between sunrise and sunset. However, while returning in company with several Clinch River people who had volunteered their assist- ance in carrying the supplies, Boone's messengers lost the trail when within three miles of the encamp- ment, and were obliged to pass the night in the for- est. It so happened that their supper-fire attracted the attention of a band of Shawnees, homeward bound after a hunt or a raid against the Cherokee villages on the Little Tennessee. The tempta- tion to secure some scalps was too strong to be re- sisted. Surrounding the unsuspecting sleepers the 88 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road Indians waited until dawn, and then made their attack, with rifle and tomahawk. Resistance was impossible, so sudden was the onslaught, and no quarter was given. Even as they sprang to their feet, half-dazed and groping for their fire-arms, the doomed victims sank back, pierced with bullets or brained by a war-hatchet. Only two, a Clinch River settler and a negro slave belonging to Russell, escaped the carnage. The rest, seven in all, and James Boone among them, were left weltering in their blood. The grief of Daniel and Rebecca Boone over the loss of their first-born, who had grown into a stalwart, intelligent, most attractive youth of seventeen, may be better imagined than described. Leaving the weeping mother to the kindly ministrations of the other women in the party, Daniel, grim and silent, rode forward to the scene of the massacre, guided by the two survivors. He had long been familiar with Indian warfare; had, as we know, been himself an Indian captive, but this was the first time that the actuality of the Indian menace had been brought directly home to him. Hitherto he had taken Ind- ian hostility to the white man as a matter of course and had reckoned with it in an impersonal way. Henceforward he could not but feel, as felt hundreds of borderers whose loved ones had fallen beneath the red man's hand, that every Indian was the incarna- Westward Ho 89 tion of all that was devilish, treacherous, and malig- nant, and should be treated accordingly. It is easy for us who have never known the horrors of the ambuscade, the raid, and the torturing at the stake to condemn the spirit of unreasoning revenge with which the frontiersmen were too often swayed in their dealings with savages. But let us in imagina- tion put ourselves in their place — let us stand, as Boone stood that chill October morning, gazing at the mangled remains of a beloved son — and we shall be far more likely to sympathize than to condemn.^ A few words of prayer, and the bodies of young Boone and his companions were tenderly consigned to their last resting-place. Then the men from the Yadkin returned to camp to deliberate as to their future course. By this time their fellow-immigrants from the Valley of Virginia and Powell's Valley had arrived, forty strong, and it was Boone's opinion that they could safely proceed. But the others demurred. To them it seemed probable that the Shawnee attack was the precursor of a general Indian uprising, and they held it madness to cut themselves off from all relief and run the risk of annihilation. Let us, they argued in substance, await developments; and in the spring, if peace * The reader who would obtain a clear insight into the borderer's point of view is recommended to consult the opening sketch — **The Pioneer" — in James Hall's "Tales of the Border." 90 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road remain unbroken, we can complete the journey. In vain Boone, who had staked his all on the Ken- tucky venture, pleaded and expostulated with them. They were obdurate, and, as the sequel proved, were wisely obdurate. From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico un- rest and suspicion were once more taking possession of the Indian peoples, as a result of the increasing evidences of the intention of the English colonists to enter in and occupy the rich Mississippi Valley. This was what the old friends of the Indians, the French, had predicted would come to pass; and it was to check the borderers' westward tendency that Pontiac had organized his great conspiracy. Fol- lowing Pontiac's conspiracy, it is true, the Indians themselves had promoted the westward movement when, in 1768, the chieftains of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, ceded to the English all of their claims to land south of the Ohio as far as the Tennessee. Possibly they imagined that the King's Proclamation of 1763, for- bidding English settlement beyond a certain distance from the sea,^ would operate to preserve this region ^ The exact purpose of the Proclamation of 1763 has been a subject of Hvely controversy among historians. Until quite re- cently, it was commonly represented as being intended to restrain the colonists from passing beyond the political and economic control of England, and was accounted a coercive measure constituting one Westward Ho! 91 from white occupation. If they so imagined, they were speedily undeceived. Not only did hunters like Boone range through it, but prospective settlers and land-speculators, regard- less of the King's Proclamation, began to stake out claims. Still further complicating the situation was the fact that many tribes denied the validity of the Iroquois cession, and asserted what Finley had told Boone when they first met in Braddock's campaign — namely, that the country between the Ohio and the Tennessee was a no-man's land, open to all the tribes for hunting purposes. Irritated and alarmed, the Shawnees, Delawares, Cherokees, and other West- ern and Southwestern Indians needed only a slight excuse to harry the frontier. Ample provocation was found in the wanton mur- der by border ruffians of the entire family of the Mingo chieftain, Logan, an Indian of really ad- mirable characteristics and long a friend to the white man. As in the days of Pontiac, the war-belt of the grievances which led to the Revolution. But modern research indicates that it was in reality designed to maintain peace between the colonists and the Indians, by guaranteeing to the latter that they should not, for a time at any rate, be disturbed in their pos- session of the Western lands. It was thus a wise and salutary, rather than a consciously repressive, measure. For an informative discussion of this subject see G. H. Alden's "New Governments West of the AUeghanies before 1780." 92 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road and the blood-stained hatchet were hurried from tribe to tribe, and soon a number of simultaneous raids on widely separated settlements gave notice that many chieftains had taken up Logan's cause, and that another struggle between the red man and the white was inevitable. It was evident, too, that the Virginia frontier was destined to suflFer most severely, and the governor of Virginia, the energetic and forceful Lord Dunmore, at once issued orders for the raising of troops to crush the uprising in its inception by carrying the war into the enemy's country. And, with a consideration not always found in colonial governors, Dunmore also ordered that messengers be sent to warn several surveying parties known to be at work in the wilds of Kentucky. At first it was thought that word might best be sent to them by way of Fort Pitt (the former Fort Du- quesne, which Braddock had in vain attempted to capture) and down the Ohio River to the Falls of the Ohio. But it was discovered that the Shawnees had established so close a blockade that navigation of the Ohio was impossible. Instructions were then hurried to Watauga, directing the employment of "two good woodsmen" to proceed into Kentucky by the Cumberland Gap route. Obviously this was a mission that called not alone for courage and endurance but for a thorough knowledge of the Westward Ho ! 93 country, and the authorities at once thought of Boone, who was recognized by them as knowing more about Kentucky than any other man in all the colonies. Ever since the failure of his home-seeking ex- pedition, Boone had been living in a deserted cabin on the Clinch, where he had found the greatest difficulty in supporting his family. He did not need a second invitation to accept this opportunity of securing some sorely needed money. Taking with him an experienced hunter, Michael Stoner, he started for the Gap about the end of June, 1774, and within ten days was in the heart of Kentucky. On or before July 8 he made the discovery that the Shawnee attack of the previous year had robbed him of the honor of planting the first Kentucky settle- ment, for he found thirty-five men, under the leader- ship of James Harrod, engaged in laying out a town in the section subsequently included in Mercer County.^ Warning them of the danger to which * The present town of Harrodsburg, known in earlier times as Harrodstown and Oldtown. Lewis Collins, in his "History of Kentucky," dates the beginning of this first Kentucky settlement about the middle of June, 1774. But, as Harrod and his com- panions, in consequence of Boone's warning, and of an attack by Indians, left Kentucky shortly after Boone's visit to them and did not return until the following spring, Harrodsburg was perma- nently settled less than a month before Boone founded the historic 94 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road they were exposed, Boone and Stoner continued overland to the Falls of the Ohio, hunting out and notifying the surveying parties for whose safety Dunmore had been so commendably concerned. After a brief rest at the Falls, the homeward jour- ney was begun, and exactly two months after they had left the Clinch Valley the plucky adventurers were once more with their relatives and neighbors, having in the interval completed a tour of many hundreds of miles through a practically unbroken wilderness. Nor did Boone return worn out by this strenuous settlement at Boonesborough. James Harrod in many ways closely resembled Boone, and became one of the most picturesque characters in early Kentucky. Collins, following Morehead, thus describes him : " Possessing qualities of a high and generous nature — tall, erect, and commanding in his personal appearance — bold, resolute, active, and energetic — inured to the life of a back- woodsman, familiar with its dangers, and capable of supporting its hardships — he was singularly adapted to the position that he was to occupy. His open, manly countenance — his mild and conciliat- ing manners — all conspired to render him the idol of his associ- ates. Expert in the use of the rifle, he was a successful hunter, and a skilful and dangerous antagonist of the Indian. ... If he received information that a party of hunters had been surprised by the savages, 'let us go out and beat the red rascals,' was his instan- taneous order; and the command and its execution were synony- mous with him. . . . Of a restless and active temperament, the dull routine of life in a station was unsuited to him. He loved, like Boone, the free and unrestrained occupation of a hunter." Westward Ho ! 95 feat. Hearing that Sevier, Robertson, and other Wataugans were marching to join the army that Lord Dunmore had raised, he started after them with a number of volunteers from the Clinch and Powell's Valley. But he was met by orders to assist in the defence of the southwestern border, which had been weakened by the departure of the Wataugans. For this reason, and only for this reason, he failed to participate in the great battle of Point Pleasant, Oct. 10, 1774, when the allied Indians, led by the famous Cornstalk, suffered overwhelming defeat after an all-day struggle, described by some as the most fiercely contested battle ever fought between the Indian and the white. But he none the less con- trived to enhance his reputation as an Indian- fighter by the bravery with which he repelled raid after raid against the settlements about the Clinch. "Mr. Boone,'' the commanding officer of the district reported, "is very diligent at Castle's Woods, and keeps up good order." Dr. Thwaites, who examined with the utmost care the correspondence relating to Lord Dunmore's War, found that it con- tained numerous compHmentary allusions to Boone. All of which, of course, redounded to his advantage. His fame spread even to the tide-water settlements; in the comfortable town house, as in the bleak log- cabin, tales of his exploits were recited, usually with ultrasensational elaborations; and by the time the 96 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road war was at an end, there were few men of the border so well known as he. Among those who heard of him was a certain Richard Henderson, of North Carolina, a man of very different type from the borderers. Born in Virginia, he removed to North Carolina when a boy of ten, making his home in Granville County, where his father gained appointment to the unpopular but remunerative post of sheriff. Young Henderson himself, when old enough, became a constable, and afterwards under-sheriff, and in this way ob- tained more or less insight into the aims and methods of the office-holding oHgarchy, or "ring,'* that then dominated county government in western North Carolina. What he saw seems to have aroused in him a strong desire not so much to correct the manifold abuses, which in time led to the Regulation Move- ment, as to turn them to his own advantage. Under existing conditions, as he clearly perceived, no class of men had better opportunities for "getting on in the world'' than did lawyers. He improved a somewhat neglected education, procured a few law-books, and after twelve months of diligent study was ad- mitted to the bar. Thereafter he made rapid prog- ress, built up a profitable practice, and in 1768, at the age of thirty-five, was appointed a justice of the North Carolina Superior Court. Westward Ho! 97 It was about this time that the Regulation troubles became acute, and before long Judge Henderson came into collision with the Regulators. In the fall of 1770, while hearing cases at Hillsborough, his court-room was invaded by a mob, some minor officials were beaten, and Henderson himself was so terrorized that during the night he mounted a fast horse and galloped out of town. A month or so later his house, barn, and stables were burned. After such treatment he naturally would have less sympathy than ever for the grievances and aspira- tions of the frontier people from whose ranks the Regulators had been recruited. He had this much in common with them, however, that he was bold, enterprising, and profoundly interested in the open- ing up of the West. But his was the interest of a speculator, not of a home-seeker, and it was coupled with a high-soaring and extraordinary ambition; for he dreamed of nothing less than emulating the achievements of Lord Baltimore, William Penn, and other colonial founders of earlier times. He would establish in faraway Kentucky a proprietary colony whose inhabitants should look up to him as their overlord, and from him take title to their lands. The mere fact that Richard Henderson could conceive such a scheme marks him out as a man of superlative self-confidence. But it was by no means a scheme altogether to his credit. He knew 98 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road perfectly well that Kentucky was a part of Virginia, and that it also came within the provisions of the King's Proclamation of 1763. Nevertheless, he steadily if quietly went ahead with his plans. It was his idea to purchase Kentucky from the Cherokees who, he asserted, were its rightful owners; and in order to obtain funds for this purpose he formed a company which he called the Transylvania Com- pany, in accordance with the name he intended giving his colony. John WilHams, Leonard Bullock, James Hogg, Nathaniel Hart, David Hart, Thomas Hart, John Luttrell, and William Johnston, all of them North Carolinians, were the men whom he prevailed upon to venture money in his risky under- taking. This necessary preliminary completed, he visited the Watauga country and sought out Boone,^ who, * It has often been stated that Boone acted as Henderson's agent long before this occasion; and that, in fact, it was as an employee of Henderson that he undertook his exploration of Ken- tucky in 1769. But I have been unable to discover any satisfac- tory evidence that Henderson even knew Boone until some time after the latter's return from Kentucky in 1 77 1 . Moreover, the claim has been recently made to me, by Professor Archibald Henderson, of the University of North Carolina, a descendant of Judge Hen- derson, that in developing his Transylvania project and purchas- ing Kentucky from the Cherokees, he acted under the advice of an eminent English jurist "in the closest confidence of the King,'* and that he therefore regarded his enterprise as having the royal Westward Ho ! 99 when the nature of the project was explained to him, readily agreed to guide Henderson to the Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee. The Cherokees, for their part, enthusiastically approved Henderson's designs. They would willingly relinquish their Kentucky claims, as also their pretensions to a strip of land giving access to Kentucky, provided only that the compensation were satisfactory. Early in 1775, accordingly, the tribesmen gathered at the Sycamore Shoals, on the Watauga, and by treaty ceded to the Transylvania Company — for a con- sideration variously stated to have been two thousand pounds in lawful money of Great Britain, ten thousand pounds worth of merchandise, and but "ten wagons loaded with cheap goods, some fire- arms, and spirituous liquors" — their shadowy claims to all the country between the Kentucky and the Cumberland. To no purpose did the governor of Virginia and the governor of North Carolina unite in denouncing sanction. This view of the case, I understand, Professor Hender- son will soon set forth in a biography of Richard Henderson. That, whatever his motives, Judge Henderson played an important part in promoting the early westward movement is beyond ques- tion, and for this he is deserving of full credit. Without his back- ing Boone would not have been able to open up his famous path- way to the West, — the Wilderness Road, — and had it not been for Henderson and the Transylvania Company, the settlement of Ken- tucky would hav2 been of far less rapid growth than it actually was. 100 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road Henderson and his associates as an "infamous com- pany of land pirates." At a safe distance from these wrathful functionaries, and secure in the knowledge that both governors would be too busily occupied in coping with the rising spirit of independence to follow up their threats, Henderson calmly continued his preparations. And, as a first and all-important measure, he en- gaged Daniel Boone to cleave a road through the wilderness, and select a seat of government for the proposed colony. J CHAPTER VII THE BUILDING OF THE WILDERNESS ROAD WHEN Daniel Boone undertook to open up a road between the border settlements and the interior of Kentucky, it was impossible for him to foresee the important place this rugged highway was to hold in the history of the territorial expansion of the American people, and the fame that would consequently accrue to him as its builder. He could have had no idea that within a few years it would be sought out and followed by a continuous stream of humanity, of thousands of men and women — aye, and little children — hurrying westward to lay the foundations of powerful, progressive common- wealths; and that these westward-hurrying people would cross the mountains not as British subjects, but as the sons and daughters of a free and indepen- dent republic whose limits and influence it was to be their part to extend. Nothing of this could Boone know, as he returned with Henderson from the treaty-making at the Sycamore Shoals. But he could and did perceive plainly that after five years of futile effort the time had come for the realiza- 102 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road tion of his fondest hopes, and with good-will he set about the task of recruiting a party of road- makers. So liberal were the terms offered to settlers by the Transylvania Company that he found Httle diffi- culty in securing volunteers. Squire Boone was one who agreed to accompany him, and another was his companion on the Dunmore mission, Michael Stoner. There were others to enlist under him who afterwards attained more or less distinction in Kentucky history — men like Richard Callaway, WilHam Bush, David Gass, and Felix Walker. All to- gether, a company of "thirty guns" was organized, almost every man of whom was a trained woodsman and Indian fighter. It was intended by Henderson and his partners that the road should begin within easy access of the principal route of travel through the Valley of Vir- ginia, and to carry out this plan the party rendez- voused at Long Island, in the Upper Holston, just south of the present line between Virginia and Ten- nessee. According to an autobiographical state- ment left by Felix Walker, and almost our only source of information as to the events of the journey, the road-builders before starting explicitly agreed to put themselves "under the management and control of Colonel Boone, who was to be our pilot and conductor through the wilderness to the The Building of the Wilderness Road 103 promised land." After which the making of the Wilderness Road began, March 10, 1775. From the Holston, Boone struck out for Cumber- land Gap, following as direct a line as possible by way of CHnch River and Powell's River, both of which were crossed without difficulty. Indeed, as far as the Gap, and for some miles beyond it, Boone's chief task consisted in skilfully directing the path so as to avoid abrupt descents or arduous climbs, though this was far from being entirely possible, owing to the mountainous nature of the country. Aside from this, all that he deemed it necessary to do was to indicate the way by blazing trees, and to cut down the undergrowth so that it could not spread during the summer and choke the trail. Thus, from the standpoint of the hardy back- woodsman accustomed to tasks from which others would shrink, there was little to test the mettle of the road-builders until after they forded Rockcastle River in southeastern Kentucky. Nor, up to that point, had they experienced anything more ad- venturous than a bear-hunt. But from the time they crossed the Rockcastle, both difficulties and ad- ventures began to multiply. To reach their destina- tion — an open expanse in the heart of the future Blue Grass country, near the juncture of the Ken- tucky River and Otter Creek, and chosen by Boone 104 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road years before as an ideal spot for settlement — they were obliged to turn northward from the Rock- castle,^ and at once plunged into a region of dead brushwood, through which not even the buffalo had penetrated. Every foot of the advance, for the next twenty miles, had to be won by the most painful effort; and, after chopping and burning their way through the brush, the road-makers entered a scarcely less difficult cane-brake country, where the hatchet again found constant employment. Still they coura- geously persevered, slowly but steadily pressing forward, until the welcome moment when, in the language of FeHx Walker : — "We began to discover the pleasing and rapturous appearance of the plains of Kentucky. A new sky and strange earth seemed to be presented to our view. So rich a soil we had never seen before — covered with clover in full bloom. The woods were abound- ^ Had they continued in a westerly direction they could have followed an Indian trail to the Falls of the Ohio. It was this trail which Benjamin Logan took not long afterwards, and by so doing gave his name to another and most important branch of the Wilder- ness Road. It ultimately became the main-travelled road for those entering Kentucky by way of the Ohio, and for those wishing to traverse Kentucky and go still farther north. The importance of Boone's Branch lay in the access it gave to the Blue Grass region. Both branches, however, are associated with Boone's memory, and deservedly. The Building of the Wilderness Road 105 ing with wild game — turkeys so numerous that it might be said they appeared but one flock, uni- versally scattered in the woods. It appeared that nature, in the profusion of her bounty, had spread a feast for all that lived, both for the animal and rational world. A sight so delightful to our view and so grateful to our feelings almost inclined us in transport to kiss the soil of Kentucky — in imi- tation of Columbus, as he hailed and saluted the sand on his first setting foot on the shores of America." Their troubles and labors forgotten, Boone and his comrades hastened forward, eager to begin the settlement at Otter Creek, and confident that nothing would occur to delay them. But they were sadly mistaken. On the night of March 24, while en- camped near Silver Creek, in the present Madison County, and not more than fifteen miles from their goal, they were surrounded by an Indian war-party. It had not seemed necessary to Boone to post sentinels, as he had every reason to beheve that there would be no danger from the Indians. By the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, as was said, the Six Nation Indians had abandoned their claims to Kentucky; by the treaty ending Lord Dunmore's War the Shawnees and other Northwestern tribes had taken similar action; and the friendship of the Cherokees had been secured, for the time being, by the Treaty of the Sycamore Shoals. It was not in Indian nature, io6 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road however, to permit the unopposed advance of the white man, or forego an opportunity to avenge the defeat at Point Pleasant, and consequently the sav- ages who chanced upon Boone's camp in Kentucky resolved, if possible, to annihilate his company. Just before sunrise, after a night of patient wait- ing, they silently took position behind the trees about the camp. Not an inkling of their presence did the road-makers obtain, until aroused from sleep by a chorus of ear-splitting yells and a volley of mus- ketry. Luckily for them, the Indians aimed too high, and the loss of life was small. One man was killed instantly, another was wounded so badly that he died three days later, and a third, no other than Felix Walker, was severely but not fatally wounded. This was the extent of the casualties, and while several of the whites, under the impression that they were greatly outnumbered and that re- sistance would be useless, fled back along the road they had so laboriously carved out, the rest, under the leadership of Boone, raUied and put the Indians to flight. Fearing that the attack was part of a precon- certed plan to prevent the occupation of Kentucky, and that the assailants would soon return with reen- forcements, Boone at once ordered his men to begin work on a fort, and before nightfall they were securely protected by a stout stockade, square in form, and The Building of the Wilderness Road 107 built of logs six or seven feet high, with but one nar- row opening. That day and the next passed without incident, but on the third day the alarm was given that a man had been sighted skulking through the woods. Finger on trigger, the road-builders awaited the expected attack, only to discover, to their great relief, that the man who had so startled them was not an Indian but one of the fugitives from their own camp. The same day the second victim of the surprise died, and his death so unnerved a number that they begged Boone to return to Watauga before a similar fate overtook the entire company. Boone's reply was a stubborn, bitter negative.^ He was resolved that, come what might, he would not again acknowl- ^ Felix Walker's comment on Boone's management of the ex- pedition is well worth quoting : " In the sequel and conclusion of my narrative, I must not neglect to give honor to whom honor is due. Colonel Boone conducted the company under his care through the wilderness with great propriety, intrepidity, and courage; and was I to enter an exception to any part of his conduct, it would be on the ground that he appeared void of fear and of consequences — too little caution for the enterprise. But let me, with feeling recollection and lasting gratitude, ever remember the unremitting kindness, sympathy, and attention paid to me by Colonel Boone in my distress. He was my father, my physician, and friend; he at- tended me as his child, cured my wounds by the use of medicines from the woods, nursed me with paternal affection until I recovered, without the expectation of reward." io8 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road edge failure in his efforts to gain lodgment in Ken- tucky. He had also begun to surmise, as was actually the case, that the Indian attack had been the work of a small band of marauders, and that no assault in force need be feared. Convinced, though, by the attitude of his companions that many of them would desert him unless relief soon arrived, he despatched a messenger to carry to Henderson the following ur- gent and interesting missive: — "After my compliments to you I shall acquaint you with our misfortune. On March 25 a party of Indians fired on my company about half an hour before day, and killed Mr. Twetty and his negro, and wounded Mr. Walker very deeply, but I hope he will recover. On March 28, as we were hunting for provisions, we found Samuel Tate's son, who gave us an account that the Indians fired on their camp on the 27th day. My brother and I went down and found two men killed and sculped, Thomas Mc- Dowell and Jeremiah McPhelters. I have sent a man down to all the lower companies,^ in order to gather them all to the mouth of Otter Creek. s ^ The reference is to the Harrodstown settlers and other home- seekers who had wandered in ahead of Boone's road-making party. It has been estimated that at that time more than one hundred white men were scattered in small companies through the country about the upper waters of the Kentucky. But the great majority fled to Watauga or western Virginia at news of the activity of the The Building of the Wilderness Road 109 "My advice to you, sir, is to come or send as soon as possible. Your company is desired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but are v^iUing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time to flusterate the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country, whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will ever be the case. This day we start from the battle-ground, for the mouth of Otter Creek, where we shall immediately erect a fort, which will be done before you can come or send — then we can send ten men to meet you, if you send for them. "N.B. — We stood on the ground and guarded our baggage till day, and lost nothing. We have about fifteen miles to Cantuck [the Kentucky River] at Otter Creek." This letter is dated April i, and after writing it Boone and the majority of his company began the last stage of their journey, leaving three or four to care for Felix Walker until, five days afterward, he was sufficiently recovered from his wound to be car- Indians. The attack of March 27, to which Boone refers in his letter, was evidently delivered against the camp of one of these little parties. Boone's letter, it may be added, is quoted from Collins's "History of Kentucky," where we find it explained that "with the exception of the words sculped and jlusterated the bad spelling has been corrected." It seems more than likely that there has also been some editing. Boone, though by no means illiterate, was not what one would call an expert letter-writer, and was always far more at ease with the rifle than with the pen. no Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road ried forward in a litter. Little actual road-making remained to be done, since from Silver Creek the route merged in a great buffalo trace — as trails were then usually called — worn smooth by the con- stant tramping of the heavy beasts to and fro from the Big Lick of the Kentucky, whither they went, as the name implies, to lick impregnated ground around a salt spring. Indeed, even as they approached their journey's end, the men from beyond the mountains heard a continuous, dull, rumbling sound. Boone, who understood its cause, bade them hurry to the top of a little eminence, looking down from which they beheld with astonishment a herd of two or three hundred buffalo lumbering awkwardly from the Lick and across the Kentucky River, followed by young calves that played and skipped about in bhss- ful unconsciousness of the fate which would soon be theirs, now that the white man had come to take possession of Kentucky. Looking from the eminence, too, the pioneers glimpsed a magnificent panorama, stretching off to the north and west across the verdant, rolHng country that in later times was to be covered with the "blue grass" to which Kentucky owes so much of its pros- perity. As yet all was wilderness, with never an indication of the marvels to be wrought through the intelligence of man. But it did not need a practised The Building of the Wilderness Road iii eye to perceive that Boone had brought his followers to a land of wondrous fertility. Even in the barrens about the salt lick vegetation was striving to assert itself and filling every nook and corner where it could hope to evade the deadly hoof-beats of the buffalo. The foliage of the forest trees, whether of the giant oak or the feathery elm, was fast adorning the ample boughs, which drooped with a fascinating grace. The ground, moss-carpeted, or dotted with the first wild flowers of spring, invited the weary road-makers to rest, and, sinking down, they gave themselves to undisturbed enjoyment of the scene before them. When they arose at Boone's bidding, it was to descend a gentle slope to a beautiful level in a shel- tered hollow. Open towards the Kentucky, which coursed with quiet dignity beneath a precipitous bank, the level was well wooded as it receded inland. Here, as Boone indicated with a wave of his hand, was the end of his Wilderness Road — of the narrow, blood-won path that stretched back for two hundred miles, through cane-brake and thicket, open plain and mountain gorge, to the Watauga settlements. CHAPTER VIII BOONE AS A LAW-MAKER WHILE Boone and his companions were in- dustriously engaged in the erection of a group of cabins in the sheltered level by the Kentucky, a picturesque cavalcade was slowly draw- ing near to them. At its head rode Richard Hen- derson. To do full justice to the promoter of the Transylvania Company, it must be said that, what- ever his faults, he had in him not a little of the stuff of which empire-builders are made. He was deter- mined that the foundations of his mid-wilderness colony should be securely laid, and that he would himself superintend at least the first stages of its organization. More than a week before Boone's messenger met him, he had begun the long journey westward, with an escort which numbered some fifty persons by the time it reached the Kentucky. Originally, it comprised but a personal, or official, following that included two of Henderson's partners, Nathaniel Hart and John Luttrell; his brothers, Nathaniel and Samuel Henderson; a legal represen- Boone as a Law-maker 113 tative of the Cherokees named John Farrar; an adventurous Virginian, William Cocke, afterwards famous in Tennessee history as soldier, legislator, and judge; a few prospective settlers, and several slaves. But it constantly received accessions by the way. In Powell's Valley, where Henderson arrived March 30, he was joined by the future renowned Indian fighter, Benjamin Logan, and by a party of immigrants from Virginia, among whom was Abra- ham Hanks, the maternal grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. Slow progress was made until April 7, when, a few miles to the east of Cumberland Gap, the messenger from Silver Creek arrived with the dismal news of the attack on Boone's camp. Almost at the same time word was received that five travellers had been slain by the Indians while endeavoring to enter Kentucky. This alarming intelligence caused some of Hender- son's followers to turn back, but it had quite the con- trary effect on Henderson himself, as he feared that unless he soon brought up support Boone's road- makers would abandon Kentucky, and the Transyl- vania enterprise would come to an untimely end. It did not diminish his fears to meet, a few hours after passing through the Gap, a party of forty fugi- tives who declared that the Indians were out in force. Dreading lest at any moment he might also meet Boone in flight, he called for a volunteer to ride ahead and 1 14 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road carry news of his coming. For this hazardous ser- vice Cocke promptly offered himself, and, "fixed off with a good Queen Anne's musket, plenty of am- munition, a tomahawk, a large cuttoe knife, a Dutch blanket, and no small quantity of jerked beef," ^ he galloped away amid the plaudits of the company, many of whom, on Henderson's showing, would gladly have galloped in the opposite direction had not shame restrained them. But, perceiving no signs of the enemy, the panic gradually subsided, excepting perhaps on the part of the slaves, who im- agined they saw a painted "Injun" behind every bush. Henderson himself, who had too much at stake to retreat, labored ceaselessly to restore confi- dence and hasten the advance. Beyond meeting an occasional fugitive, nothing of further moment occurred until April 15, when a seri- ous difference of opinion arose between Logan and the Transylvania partners, the upshot being that Logan and a friend named Gillespie left the main party at the Rockcastle, and turned westward to take up their residence in Lincoln County, some miles to * From a letter written by Henderson, June 12, 1775, to his part- ners, giving an account of his experiences on the road. This letter is printed in full, together with Felix Walker's narrative, the "Journal of the Transylvania House of Delegates," and much other valuable source material, in George W. Ranck's "Boonesborough," one of the best of the excellent Filson Club publications. Boone as a Law-maker 115 the southwest of Boone's settlement. Logan's de- parture was not at all to Henderson's liking, and still less was an interview he had the following day with James McAfee, a Harrodstown settler, who, with his brothers Robert and Samuel, was hurrying eastward to escape the expected Indian avalanche. These McAfees had been among the first to visit Kentucky after the Boone-Finley expedition of 1769, and, like Boone, Logan, and Harrod, they became prominently identified with its early settlement. They hailed from Virginia, and were typical backwoodsmen. Henderson, after vainly endeavoring to persuade them that the danger from the Indians was greatly exaggerated, explained the purpose of his presence in Kentucky, and offered liberal terms of settlement if they would turn back with him and take up land in the Transylvania grant. To which James McAfee, who seems to have understood the situation better than most of the borderers, bluntly replied that Vir- ginia, not the Transylvania Company, had the disposal of Kentucky lands. Samuel and Robert McAfee, however, were sufficiently impressed by Henderson's glib exposition of the Cherokee sale, to disregard their brother's advice and throw in their fortunes with the Transylvanians. It was an incident, though, that cast a damper over the spirits of the Transylvania partners, arguing as it did possible opposition on the part of other bor- Ii6 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road derers, such as James Harrod, who had already taken possession of land within the limits defined by the Sycamore Shoals Treaty. But their thoughts were almost immediately diverted into more pleasant channels by the appearance of Michael Stoner, sent by Boone to let Henderson know that all was going well, and to assist him with a relay of fresh pack- horses. Henderson also learned from Stoner that Cocke had reached "Fort Boone" in safety, and that Felix Walker was rapidly recovering from the wound sustained in the surprise at Silver Creek. April 20,^ two days after they had been joined by Stoner, and after having been travelling for more than a month over a road that had proved for most part "either hilly, stony, slippery, miry, or bushy," the three Proprietors of Transylvania and their attend- ant retinue rode proudly into Boone's little settle- ment, where they were received with a salute of twenty-five guns. An hour later the entire company sat down to a banquet, of which the principal vi- ands were cold water and lean buffalo meat. Before nightfall, spurred possibly by dread of in- * This date is worth noting, as it was just onet day after the raid on Concord and the battle of Lexington. It is certainly an inter- esting coincidence that the opening gun in the struggle for indepen- dence should have been fired at practically the time when the expansion of the American people may be said to have begun in earnest. 'I Boone as a Law-maker 117 terference from Virginia, Henderson turned his at- tention to the task of allotting land for immediate settlement, and at once made the distinctly embar- rassing discovery that Boone and his companions had preempted the choicest locations for themselves. Rather than have trouble, the tactful Proprietor decided to leave them in undisturbed possession and appease the rest by locating the site of the capital of Transylvania, not in the sheltered level chosen by Boone, but some little distance from it, on a com- manding elevation overlooking the Kentucky. The work of clearing away the trees and under- growth began without delay, and in little more than a week's time the foundations were laid for a large fortified "station" to which, fittingly enough, the name of Boonesborough was given. Not a vestige of it remains to-day, but fortunately a plan, drawn by Henderson himself, has been preserved, and from this it appears that Boonesborough was a typical palisaded village of the pioneering period. It con- sisted of nearly thirty one-story cabins, arranged in a hollow square and enclosed by a log stockade, part of which was formed by the backs of the cabins. At each corner stood a two-story blockhouse, the second story projecting about two feet over the lower, so that the inmates could shoot from above upon an enemy attempting to scale the stockade, which was entered by only two gates, one opening towards the buffalo Ii8 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road lick, the other towards the river. Stockade, cabins, and blockhouses were provided with little port- holes for rifles. It was a rude system of defence, but it answered admirably the requirements of Indian warfare. Of course the building of Boonesborough took time, but Henderson found much to keep him busily engaged while its construction was in progress. As already stated, there were earlier settlers within the limits of the Transylvania Purchase, settlers at Harrodstown and also at Boiling Spring, which might almost be called a suburb of Harrodstown, since it was quite near that place and had likewise been founded by James Harrod. Besides these two set- tlements, a party of Virginians, under the command of Captain John Floyd, had quite recently estab- Hshed themselves on Dick's River, some thirty miles southwest of Boonesborough. Floyd was an official surveyor for Virginia, and it seemed altogether likely that he would refuse to recognize the validity of the purchase from the Cherokees. But when he visited Boonesborough, early in May, he came in the friend- liest mood imaginable, assuring Henderson that if good terms were offered to him and his comrades, they should gladly become citizens of Transylvania. Otherwise, they would remove across the Kentucky and settle on land not included in the Cherokee grant. Similarly, James Harrod, speaking in behalf of the Boone as a Law-maker 119 settlers at Harrodstown and Boiling Spring, ex- pressed willingness to take title from the Transyl- vania Company. Greatly relieved by this agreeable solution of a problem that had worried him not a little, Henderson bent his energies to the no less difficult task of or- ganizing a government for his colony. He had seen enough of the backwoodsmen — whom he seems to have heartily disliked, for he describes them in his journal as "a set of scoundrels who scarcely believe in God -or fear a Devil, if we were to judge from most of their words, looks, and actions" — to know that they would insist on having a voice in the management of affairs. The question was how to reconcile their instinctive desire for self-government with his determination to keep the supreme authority in the hands of himself and his partners. If they intrusted to a popular assembly the power of making and executing laws, it was quite conceivable that legislation fatal to the interests of the company might be enacted. The only feasible course, as it seemed to him, was to frame a semi-autocratic, semi-democratic scheme of govern- ment, giving an outward semblance of sovereignty to the "people'' but withholding its realities. It was a plan ill-adapted either to the temper of the times or to the conditions of life in the wilderness, and it was foredoomed to failure. But it promised well enough 120 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road at first, and is of the greatest importance to students of American history, since out of it grew Kentucky's first constitution, and the first meeting of a fully organized legislature west of the AUeghanies. The settlers, as may be imagined, were delighted with the announcement that it was proposed to con- vene a representative assembly with delegates from each of the four settlements, Boonesborough, Har- rodstown. Boiling Spring, and Floyd's settlement, to which the name of St. Asaph had been given. Elections were held about May 20, and on May 23 the delegates gathered at Boonesborough, where the fort was still so far from completion that they were obliged to meet in the open, under a giant elm.^ * Henderson, in his journal, under date of May 14, gives a graphic description of this historic tree: "About fifty yards from the place where I am writing and right before me to the south (the river about fifty yards behind my camp, and a fine spring a little to the west) stands one of the finest elms that perhaps nature ever produced in any region. This tree is placed in a beautiful plain surrounded by a turf of fine white clover, forming a green to its very stock to which there is scarcely anything to be likened. The trunk is about four feet through to the first branches which are about nine feet high from the ground. From thence above, it so regularly extends its large branches on every side at such equal distances as to form the most beautiful tree that imagination can suggest. The diameter of its branches from the extreme ends is one hundred feet — and every fair day it describes a semi-circle, on the heavenly green around it, of upward of four hundred feet, and any time between )m Boone as a Law-maker I2i Boonesborough was represented by six delegates, and each of the others sent four. With few excep- tions the electors had chosen the real leaders of their respective communities, the men who had been con- spicuous for their efforts to carry civilization west- ward. The Boonesborough delegation included Daniel and Squire Boone, WilHam Cocke, Richard Callaway, William Moore, and Richard Hender- son's brother Samuel, the last-named having been elected probably out of compliment to the chief Proprietor. From Harrodstown came Thomas Slaughter, Dr. John Lythe (a clergyman of the Church of England), Valentine Harman, and James Douglas. James Harrod headed the delegation from Boiling Spring, and was accompanied by Nathan Hammond, Azariah Davis, and Isaac Hite, two of whom, Davis and Hite, had been associated with Harrod in the founding of both Harrodstown and Boiling Spring. John Floyd, of course, was a delegate from St. Asaph, which also sent John Todd, Samuel Wood, and Alexander Spotswood Dandridge. It is well to bear these names in mind, for we shall the hours of ten and two, one hundred persons may commodiously seat themselves under its branches. This divine tree, or rather one of the many proofs of the existence from all eternity of its divine Author, is to be our church, state-house, council-chamber." Clearly, there v^as a strong strain of the romantic and the senti- mental in Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina. 122 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road meet with them again, and some of them quite fre- quently, in connection with later events of impor- tance. A low platform had been built at the foot of the great elm, and around this the delegates grouped themselves, some seated on the turf, others on logs, and others standing erect, leaning on their rifles. It was a picturesque assemblage, and an assemblage of serious-minded men, very much in earnest. No more striking commentary on the spirit in which they came together can be found than in the fact that they invited Dr. Lythe to open the proceedings by a prayer for divine guidance in their deliberations. Following this, they elected Thomas Slaughter as their presiding officer, and then waited in a body on the three Proprietors — Henderson, Hart, and Lut- trell — to notify them that the "Transylvania House of Delegates" had been formally organized, and would be pleased to hear any suggestions they might have to make. At this announcement — which, needless to say, had been prearranged — Henderson mounted the platform and, in a resonant voice and with no small dramatic effect, read aloud a carefully prepared address. Printed in full in Mr. Ranck's "Boonesborough** it constitutes a most interesting document. It re- veals Henderson's constant and well-grounded fear of "foreign" intervention, his anxiety to vindicate I Boone as a Law-maker 123 the rightfulness of the cession by the Cherokees, and his intense desire to conceal from the represen- tatives of the people of Transylvania the subordinate part which he intended they should play in the gov- ernment of the Colony. He began by artfully flattering their well-known democratic prepossessions, and by emphasizing in glowing language the influence which the laws drawn up by them might be expected to have. "If pru- dence, firmness, and wisdom," he assured them, "are suffered to influence your counsels and direct your conduct, the peace and harmony of thousands may be expected to result from your deliberations. . . . You, perhaps, are fixing the palladium, or placing the first corner-stone of an edifice, the height and magnificence of whose superstructure is now in the womb of futurity, and can only become great and glorious in proportion to the excellence of its founda- tion." He reminded them — and the sentiment was no doubt received with an outburst of applause — that "all power is originally with the people." He vehemently insisted that they had the right to make laws for the regulation of their conduct, "without giving offence to Great Britain or any of the Ameri- can Colonies, without disturbing the repose of any society or community under Heaven." Adverting to the official opposition to the Sycamore Shoals Treaty, he especially denounced the procla- 124 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road mation of Governor Martin of North CaroHna, as falsely "placing the proprietors of the soil at the head of a lawless train of abandoned villains, against whom the regal authority ought to be executed"; and he urged the delegates to enact such laws as would dis- prove utterly the charge that Transylvania had been founded as " an asylum for debtors and other persons of desperate circumstances." This naturally led him to speak of the measures which he regarded as essential to the welfare of the community. Courts would have to be established for the punishment of criminals, as also for "the recovery of debts, and determining matters of dispute with respect to property, contracts, torts, injuries, etc." No less important was the organization of a militia system. It was quite true that as yet there had been no recurrence of the Indian alarm, but, Henderson warned his hearers, it could only be a question of time when they would be involved in a war with the savages. "I am persuaded," said he, "that nothing but their entire ignorance of our weakness and want of order has hitherto preserved us from the destructive and rapacious bands of cruelty, and given us an op- portunity at this time of forming some defensive plans to be supported and carried into execution by the authority and sanction of a well-digested law." He also referred to the need for a game law, pointing out Boone as a Law-maker 125 that the buffalo and other food-giving and fur-bear- ing animals were rapidly disappearing as a result of the settlers' wasteful methods of hunting.^ In con- clusion, he reiterated the great interest felt by the Proprietors in the welfare of Transylvania, and their intention of cheerfully concurring " in every measure which can in the most distant and remote degree promote its happiness or contribute to its grandeur/' Highly satisfied with his address, the delegates set about giving effect to its recommendations, and, backwoodsmen though most of them were, went to work with a noteworthy regard for parliamentary usage. Committees were appointed to draw up and report bills, and when brought in, the bills were de- bated, referred back, and amended before being put on final passage. In this law-making Daniel Boone was conspicuous. He was chairman of the com- mittee intrusted with framing a law for the preserva- tion of game, and he also sponsored a measure of ^ On this point there is a luminous reference in Henderson's journal, under date as early as May 9. "We found it very difficult at first," he records, "to stop great waste in killing meat. Some would kill three, four, five, or half a dozen buffaloes and not take half a horse load from them all. For want of a little obligatory law our game as soon as got here, if not before, was driven off very much. Fifteen or twenty miles was as short a distance as good hunters thought of getting meat, nay sometimes they were obliged to go thirty, though by chance once or twice a week buffalo was killed within five or six miles." 126 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road great historic interest — a bill for improving the breed of horses. Little did the rugged road-maker and pioneer dream that in this bill lay the germ for Kentucky's future fame as the land, par excellence, of fine horses. Other bills passed during the brief session — it lasted less than a week — related to the establish- ment of a militia and tribunals of justice, the regu- lating of legal fees and of the issuance of writs of attachment, and, finally, "an act to prevent profane swearing and Sabbath breaking." Here, in truth, we catch a glimpse of the Covenanter spirit, of the sound religious principles which these rough- and-ready frontiersmen brought with them from their cabin homes of the Virginia and Carolina border. But the principal event of the session was the sign- ing of a compact between the Proprietors and the representatives of the people. This was the colony's constitution, and the earliest document of the kind — barring the Watauga Articles of Association, which have not come down to us — recorded in the annals of the West. According to the " Journal of the House of Delegates," it was drawn up by a com- mittee consisting of Representatives Todd, Lythe, Douglas, and Hite; but to judge from the evidence afforded by its provisions, it must have been prepared under the watchful eye of Richard Henderson. It Q -q ^ I Boone as a Law-maker 127 unmistakably surrendered the control of public business to the Proprietors, and left the House of Delegates with the shadow rather than the substance of authority. Yet it contained some praiseworthy features, particularly a clause declaring for religious toleration. It is not a long document, and is well worth reprinting. "Whereas," it opens, "it is highly necessary for the peace of the Proprietors and the security of the people of this Colony, that the powers of the one and the liberties of the other be ascertained ; We, Richard Henderson, Nathaniel Hart, and J. Luttrell, on be- half of ourselves as well as the other Proprietors of the Colony of Transylvania, of the one part, and the representatives of the people of said Colony, in con- vention assembled, of the other part — do most solemnly enter into the following contract or agree- ment, to wit: — "That the election of delegates in this Colony be annual. "That the Convention may adjourn, and meet again on their own adjournment; Provided, that in cases of great emergency, the Proprietors may call together the delegates before the time adjourned to; and, if a majority do not attend, they may dissolve them and call a new one. "That, to prevent dissension and delay of busi- ness, one Proprietor shall act for the whole, or some 128 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road one delegated by them for that purpose, who shall always reside in the Colony. "That there be perfect religious freedom and toleration; Provided, that the propagators of any doctrine or tenets evidently tending to the subversion of our laws, shall, for such conduct, be amenable to, and punished by, the civil courts. "That the judges of the superior or supreme courts be appointed by the Proprietors, but be sup- ported by the people, and to them be answerable for their malconduct. "That the quit-rents never exceed two shillings per hundred acres. "That the Proprietors appoint a sheriff, who shall be one of three persons recommended by the court. "That the judges of the superior courts have, without fee or reward, the appointment of the clerks of this colony. "That the judges of the inferior courts be recom- mended by the people, and approved by the Pro- prietors, and by them commissioned. "That all other civil and military officers be within the appointment of the Proprietors. "That the office of surveyor-general belong to no person interested or a partner in this purchase. "That the legislative authority, after the strength and maturity of the Colony will permit, consist of three branches, to wit: the delegates or representa- Boone as a Law-maker 129 tives chosen by the people; a council, not exceeding twelve men, possessed of landed estate, who reside in the Colony, and the Proprietors. "That nothing with respect to the number of delegates from any town or settlement shall here- after be drawn into precedent, but that the number of representatives shall be ascertained by law, when the state of the Colony will admit of amendment. "That the land office be always open. "That commissions without profit be granted without fee. "That the fees and salaries of all officers appointed by the Proprietors, be settled and regulated by the laws of the country. "That the Convention have the sole power of rais- ing and appropriating all public moneys, and elect- ing their treasurer. "That, for a short time, till the state of the Colony will permit to fix some place of holding the Conven- tion which shall be permanent, the place of meeting shall be agreed upon between the Proprietors and the Convention. "To the faithful and rehgious and perpetual obser- vance of all and every of the above articles, the said Proprietors, on behalf of themselves as well as those absent, and the chairman of the Convention, on behalf of them and their constituents, have hereunto interchangeably set their hands and affixed their 130 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road seals, the twenty-seventh day of May, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five." Thus, the taxing power was the sole governmental faculty of any importance bestowed on the repre- sentatives of the people. Otherwise there was scarcely any check on the Proprietors, who could fill the courts and other civil offices with functionaries of their own choosing, could select military officers subservient to their wishes; and, by resorting to the clause providing for the dissolution of the Con- vention might so manoeuvre that even the popular branch of the legislature would be "packed" in their interest. It was, in fine, an excellent frame- work for the creation of an oligarchic system not unlike that under which Henderson and several of his Transylvania partners had flourished in North Carolina. But, as the Regulator Movement had demonstrated in the case of the North Carolina system, the oligarchic and the autocratic could not hope to endure in the free air of the border. For the present, however, no objections were raised, and the delegates brought their labors to a close by participating in a singular but impressive ceremony, intended probably to confirm them in the idea that all who would settle in Transylvania must purchase their land from the Company. As was said at the beginning of this chapter, Henderson had been accompanied from Watauga by a lawyer i Boone as a Law-maker 131 named Farrar, retained as the representative of the Cherokees. On the morning after the signing of the compact, Henderson, standing under the huge elm, read to the delegates the title deed executed by the Cherokees, and called upon Farrar to com- plete the cession of the soil by performing the ancient feudal ceremony of "livery of seisin." Stooping down, the lawyer cut out a piece of the luxuriant turf and handed it to Henderson, pronouncing as he did so the legal formula by which possession of the soil was specifically "dehvered'* to the Transylvania Proprietors. The next day, Sunday, May 28, the representatives from Harrodstown, Boiling Spring, and St. Asaph started for their homes, but before their departure all attended divine service, conducted by Dr. Lythe beneath the shade of the giant elm. "It was," as Mr. Ranck finely says, in his history of Boones- borough, "a religious event absolutely unique. Most of the usual accessories of the service were wanting, from echoing church bell and 'long drawn aisle' to peaHng organ. No woman was there to join in htany or hymn, no child to lisp *amen.' Only men were present — Dissenters as well as Episcopa- lians — for common dangers had drawn them to- gether, and this one chance for public worship was eagerly seized by pioneers who were as strong in simple faith as stout in heart." 132 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road As was the custom, prayers were said for the king and royal family of England. It was the first and last time such prayers were publicly recited on the soil of Kentucky. Within a week new-comers from the East brought the long-delayed tidings of the battle of Lexington. From settlement to settle- ment the news flew like wild-fire, to create in each a furore of excitement and enthusiasm. Nor can we beheve that the liberty-loving sons of the unfet- tered frontier would have huzzaed one whit less loudly could they have foreseen the woes which the struggle for independence was to bring upon them. CHAPTER IX THE PASSING OF TRANSYLVANIA WITH the adjournment of the House of Dele- gates the people of Boonesborough settled down to the everyday life of the frontier, cultivating the corn and vegetables which they had planted at the time of their arrival, completing the construction of their dwelling-places, and going on long hunts. There were numerous departures, both of settlers who, like Daniel Boone, wished to bring out their famiHes, and of others, such as WilHam Cocke, who had journeyed to Kentucky more in a spirit of adventure and curiosity than as true home-seekers. Boone was among the first to leave, setting out June 13 in company with a number of young men sent by Henderson to obtain fresh supplies from the Watauga settlements. He found his wife and children well, and late in the autumn returned with them. A few days afterwards Richard Callaway, who had gone East on a similar mission, arrived at Boonesborough with Mrs. Callaway and their boys and girls, together with several other immigrants and their families. To Boone's wife and daughters, ^33 134 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road however, as he often recalled with pride, belongs the honor of having been the first white women to set foot on the banks of the Kentucky. Meantime, Henderson and Luttrell had started for North Carolina in order to confer with their partners regarding the future of Transylvania. The American Revolution had by this time made such progress that no danger was to be apprehended from the representatives of the British Crown either in Virginia or North Carolina, and although Hender- son was well aware that the recently created patriot government of Virginia would be unwilling to forego Virginia's claim to the whole of Kentucky, he was hopeful of being able to persuade the Continental Congress to recognize the validity of his purchase from the Indians. Should the Congress take such action it would, he felt, estabHsh for all time the right of the Transyl- vania Company to dispose of, as its members saw fit, the seventeen million acres embraced in the Cherokee Cession. In any event, something had to be done to relieve the Proprietors of the perpetual anxiety created by the knowledge that at any time Transyl- vania might be overrun by an army of immigrants unwilling to pay for the land on which they chose to settle, and basing their refusal on the prior right of Virginia to the country. Arriving in North Carolina about the middle of The Passing of Transylvania 135 September, Henderson immediately called a general meeting of the Company. It was held at the little town of Oxford, in Granville County, with seven of the nine partners present, the absentees being David Hart and his brother Nathaniel, who had remained at Boonesborough to keep a watchful eye on the trend of events. After taking action on several matters of a personal or purely commercial character — such as fixing the terms under which future settlers could obtain land, appointing John Williams as the Company's permanent representative in Transyl- vania, and voting Daniel Boone a gift of two thousand acres in recognition of "the signal services he has rendered to the Company" — the Proprietors gave their undivided attention to the all-important prob- lem of successfully combatting the almost certain opposition of Virginia. It was boldly resolved to endeavor to secure Tran- sylvania's admission as the fourteenth Colony in the Revolutionary Union, and for this purpose the partners selected one of their number, James Hogg, to lay before the Continental Congress a memorial in which, after a preamble setting forth their firm belief in the legality of the purchase, and their determina- tion "to give it up only with their lives," they ex- pressed an earnest desire to be considered "as brethren engaged in the same great cause of liberty and of mankind," and concluded by saying: — 136 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road "From the generous plan of liberty adopted by the Congress and that noble love of mankind which appears in all their proceedings, the memorialists please themselves that the United Colonies v^ill take the infant Colony of Transylvania into their pro- tection; and they, in return, w^ill do everything in their pov^er, and give such assistance in the general cause of America as the Congress shall judge to be suitable to their abilities. Therefore the memorial- ists hope and earnestly expect that Transylvania may be added to the number of the United Colonies, and that James Hogg, Esq., be received as their delegate, and admitted to a seat in the honorable the Con- tinental Congress." An instructive side-light on the men who composed the Transylvania Company is afforded by the fact that they did not hesitate to turn Hogg's delicate mission to money-making purposes. "Resolved," reads one of the resolutions adopted at the same meeting, "that Mr. Hogg be empowered to treat and contract with any person or persons who may incline to purchase lands from the Company, and that he be allowed his expenses for transacting the above business." Excepting the suave Richard Henderson, Hogg was perhaps the best-fitted of them all for this sordid combination of diplomacy and land-jobbing. He was a shrewd, canny Scot, with an eye ever open to J The Passing of Transylvania 137 the main chance; he was a man of good appearance and plausible manner, and he was abundantly en- dowed with what, in the slang of the present day, would be described as " nerve." ^ When he reached Philadelphia, he found Congress absorbed in the serious work of reorganizing and providing for the patriot army, but this did not prevent him from thrusting himself and his affairs upon its attention. He sought out John Adams, Samuel Adams, Silas Deane, and other leading men, and by sheer per- sistency interested them in Transylvania. They examined the maps he had brought with him from North Carolina, listened carefully to his de- tailed recital of the circumstances attending the purchase from the Cherokees, the building of the Wilderness Road, and the settling of Boonesborough, and gave their cordial approval to the democratic manner in which the settlers had been brought together in convention for the purpose of framing the laws of the Colony. But they made it plainly evident that they would not countenance any pro- prietary form of government. Silas Deane, ever an enthusiast in the cause of liberty and democracy, was even at the pains of drawing up an outline scheme ^ It is perhaps worth noting that the term "nerve" also found place in the slang of the border. But the pioneers used it to indi- cate a high and praiseworthy degree of courage, not in its modern implication of unblushing effrontery. 138 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road of government for the new Colony, based on the Connecticut system. "You would be amazed," wrote Hogg to Hender- son, "to see how much in earnest these speculative gentlemen are about the plan to be adopted by the Transylvanians. They entreat, they pray, that we make it a free government, and beg that no mercenary or ambitious views in the Proprietors may prevent it. Quit-rents, they say, is a mark of vassal- age, and hope they will not be established in Transyl- vania. They even threaten us with their opposition if we do not act upon liberal principles when we have it so much in our power to render ourselves immortal. Many of them advised a law against negroes." But, besides the obnoxious proprietary element in the government of Transylvania, there was an insuperable obstacle to recognizing the new Colony, even though Virginia should make no protest. At that time all hope of a reconcihation with the mother country had not been abandoned, and as the Adamses pointed out to Hogg, Congress would be greatly handicapped in its efforts towards a peace- ful adjustment if it received into the Union a Colony established on land purchased from the Indians by private individuals, for such a purchase was ex- pressly forbidden by the King's Proclamation of 1763. The Passing of Transylvania 139 **We have petitioned and addressed the king/* said they, ** and have entreated him to point out some mode of accommodation. There seems to be an im- propriety in embarrassing our reconcihation with anything new; and the taking under our protection a body of people who have acted in defiance of the king's proclamations will be looked on as a con- firmation of that independent spirit with which we are daily reproached." Nothing daunted, Hogg pointed to a clause in the Proprietors' memorial disavowing any desire of throwing off their allegiance to the Crown. This, though, scarcely met the objection raised by the Adamses. Still Hogg persisted until, to be rid of him, they declared that, as Transylvania fell within the charter boundaries of Virginia, they could make no move in his favor without the consent of their colleagues from Virginia. It was an unwelcome intimation, and with the gloomiest forebodings Hogg interviewed Jefferson and Wythe, two of Virginia's delegates to Congress. He was careful to say nothing whatever about the memorial, or about his pretensions to a seat in Con- gress, and simply explained that the Transylv^ania Company, fearing misrepresentations against it, had sent him to Philadelphia to let it be known that the Proprietors and people of Transylvania were heartily on the side of liberty. He hoped, therefore. 140 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road that the gentlemen from Virginia would have no objection to his laying the views and desires of Tran- sylvania before Congress. In reply, as he had fully expected, Jefferson and Wythe hinted that it would be well first to determine the status of Transylvania, — that quite possibly Virginia might wish to exercise its charter rights, — and, until such determination were had, they would strongly oppose any "acknowledgment" of Transyl- vania by Congress. To be sure, Jefferson promised "that if his advice were followed, all the use they should make of their charter would be to prevent any arbitrary or oppressive government to be estab- lished within the boundaries of it"; and he further assured Hogg "that it was his wish to see a free government established at the back of theirs, properly united with them." ^ But he would by no means consent to Congressional recognition of Transylvania as a separate Colony, prior to the renunciation of Virginia's claim by the people of Virginia in con- vention assembled. The thing for you to do, he bluntly told Hogg, is to send a representative to the next Convention and gain its approval — the matter is one for Virginia ^ From Hogg's report of the results of his ''embassy," a curious and interesting document. It may be consulted in Peter Force's "American Archives," Vol. IV of the Sixth Series; or in Mr. Ranck's " Boonesborough." The Passing of Transylvania 141 to decide, not Congress. Wythe was of the same opinion, and so was Richard Henry Lee, whom Hogg interviewed a few days later. Other delegates, in- cluding the North Carolinians Hooper and Hewes, who had been very friendly to him, warned him that Congress would do nothing, and that it would be unwise for him to press farther for recognition. He had arrived at Philadelphia late in October; before the end of November he was homeward bound, reluctantly persuaded that his mission had proved a failure, at any rate on its diplomatic side; and, by the opening of the new year, the Transylvania partners were feverishly preparing for the bitter poHtical fight which it was now certain they would have to wage in Virginia. In the interval a storm had been brewing for them in quite another quarter — in Transylvania itself. All through the summer and autumn a constant, if as yet comparatively insignificant, stream of immigration had flowed across the mountains, through Cumberland Gap, and along the Wilderness Road to the mid-Kentucky wilderness. Among the newcomers were men destined to fill conspicuous roles in the dramatic and tragic struggle of the next few years. One of them was George Rogers Clark, the future conqueror of Kaskaskia and Vincennes and hero of the unforgettable mid-winter march across the drowned lands of the Wabash. Another 142 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road was William Whitley, the celebrated hunter, scout, and Indian fighter. Jesse Benton, the father of that great statesman of the West, Thomas Hart Benton, also came in about this time, as did the recklessly brave Hugh McGary, whom we shall find leading the Ken- tuckians to destruction at the battle of the Blue Lick. Still another arrival during the autumn of 1775, though not by the Wilderness Road, was Robert Patterson, a participant in the founding of three cities, Lexington in Kentucky, and Cincinnati and Dayton in Ohio. All together, between two and three hundred home- seekers were added to the population of Transylvania before the close of 1775. They could not reasonably expect to take land under the terms offered by the Company to those who had opened up the country during the spring of that year, but they by no means anticipated the stiff advance in prices put into effect upon the arrival of the Company's agent, John Williams, about the beginning of December. Formerly, land had been offered at twenty shillings per hundred acres; now the same acreage was to cost fifty shillings, with the expectation of a further advance after June i, 1776. No single allotment was to include more than six hundred and forty acres, "except in particular cases," and on every hundred acres an annual quit-rent of two shiUings The Passing of Transylvania 143 would be exacted from old and new settlers alike. Every title-deed was to contain a clause requiring the purchaser to hand over to the Company one-half of all the gold, silver, copper, lead, or sulphur he might discover on his property. Moreover, certain fees had to be paid before a purchase would be con- sidered complete — fees for entering a claim, for having a survey made, and for the drawing up of the deed — amounting in all to nearly two pounds. And, as Williams publicly advertised, every settler was required to pay these fees in full before April i, 1776; otherwise his land would be adjudged open to settlement by any one making the necessary payments. Nor was this all that exasperated the people of Transylvania and embittered them against the Company. The discovery was made that the Pro- prietors had reserved for themselves and a few favored friends nearly seventy thousand acres of choice land at the Falls of the Ohio, where it was almost certain the most important commercial cen- tre of the Colony would ultimately be established. And the settlers found another, though minor, grievance in the opening of a Company's store at Boonesborough, with goods selling at exorbitant prices — how exorbitant may be judged from the fact that while the Company paid ordinary laborers less than a shilling and a half a day, and hunters 144 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road and road-makers only two shillings, lead sold in the Company's store at nearly a shilling, and gun- powder at ten shillings per pound. Anger and dis- satisfaction spread rapidly, and before long a de- termined movement was under way to break the power of the Proprietors. This movement had its origin at Harrodstown and Boiling Spring, both of which places, it will be remembered, had been settled before the building of the Wilderness Road and the advent of Henderson, Hart, and Luttrell. Enraged at the thought that they were expected to pay tribute — in the way of quit- rents and land-office fees — to men who had not even preceded them into Kentucky, James Harrod and other of the original settlers recalled with satis- faction the savagely denunciatory proclamations of the governors of Virginia and North Carolina. It should not be a difficult matter, they fancied, to pick flaws in the Company's title to Transylvania. They looked up the provisions of the Proclamation of 1763 and of the Treaty of 1768, by which the Six Nations had rehnquished to the British Crown their pretensions to Kentucky. They also scrutinized more closely than heretofore the compact between the Proprietors and the people, and realized for the first time how cleverly Henderson had hoodwinked the members of the House of Delegates. In their anxiety, perplexity, and wrath they resolved that, The Passing of Transylvania 145 come what might, they would disown the proprietary government and agitate for the recognition of Tran- sylvania as a part of Virginia. An incident which occurred two days before Christ- mas greatly advanced their "treasonable" project by affording an object-lesson in the need the settlers might have for outside aid against the Indians, and the advantage it would be to them if they were in a position to demand assistance from one of the older and more powerful colonies. The Indians had observed their treaty obligations so faithfully that the Transylvanians had almost come to beheve that they would be quite free from molestation. But on December 23 two Boonesborough boys, McQuin- ney and Saunders, were surprised by a party of Shawnees. Four days afterwards McQuinney, killed and scalped, was found in a corn-field three miles north of the Kentucky. Saunders's fate was never learned. Naturally there was much excitement until it developed that the raiders were not more than half a dozen in number, and that no organized attack was imminent. But even so, the affair drove home to the minds of the Transylvanians a vivid appreciation of their exposed situation, and incHned them all the more towards the views of the Harrodstown-Boiling Spring agitators, who made such progress that before the snows of winter had melted they were able to send 146 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road to Virginia a largely signed memorial voicing their discontent and their aspirations. For a backwoods production this was a remarkable document, devised with a shrewdness that would have done credit to Richard Henderson himself. It was addressed to the Virginia Convention, as a petition from "the inhabitants and some of the in- tended settlers of that part of North America now denominated Transylvania," and without any super- fluous words plunged directly into an attack on the Company. "Whereas," the memorialists declared, "some of your petitioners became adventurers in that country from the advantageous reports of their friends who first explored it, and others since allured by the specious shew of the easy terms on which the land was to be purchased from those who styled themselves Proprietors, have, at a great expense and many hardships, settled there, under the faith of holding the lands by an indefeasible title, which those gentlemen assured them they were capable of making. But your petitioners have been greatly alarmed at the late conduct of those gentlemen, in advancing the price of the purchase money from twenty shillings to fifty shillings, per hundred acres, and at the same time have increased the fees of entry and surveying to a most exorbitant rate; and, by the short period prefixed for taking up the lands, even on those extravagant terms, they plainly evince J The Passing of Transylvania 147 their intentions of rising in their demands as the settlers increase, or their insatiable avarice shall dictate. "And your petitioners have been more justly alarmed at such unaccountable and arbitrary pro- ceedings as they have lately learned from a copy of the deed made by the Six Nations with Sir William Johnson and the commissioners from this Colony [Virginia] at Fort Stanwix in the year 1768, that the said lands were included in the cession or grant of all that tract which lies on the south side of the river Ohio, beginning at the mouth of Cherokee or Hogo- hege River [the Tennessee] and extending up the said river to Kettaning [on the Allegheny River]. And, as in the preamble of the said deed, the said confederate Indians declare the Cherokee River to be their true boundary v^ith the southard Indians, your petitioners may with great reason doubt the validity of the purchase that those Proprietors have made of the Cherokees — the only title they set up to the lands for which they demand such extravagant sums from your petitioners, without any other as- surance for holding them than their own deed and warrant; a poor security, as your petitioners humbly apprehend, for the money that, among other new and unreasonable regulations, these Proprietors in- sist shall be paid down on the delivery of the deed. "And, as we have the greatest reason to presume 148 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road that His Majesty, to whom the lands were deeded by the Six Nations for a valuable consideration, will vindicate his title, and think himself at hberty to grant them to such persons and on such terms as he pleases, your petitioners would, in consequence thereof, be turned out of possession or obliged to purchase their lands and improvements on such terms as the new grantee or proprietor might think fit to impose; so that we cannot help regarding the demand of Mr. Henderson and his Company as highly unjust and impolitic, in the infant state of the settlement, as well as greatly injurious to your petitioners, who would cheerfully have paid the consideration at first stip- ulated by the Company, whenever their grant had been confirmed by the Crown, or otherwise authenti- cated by the supreme legislature. "And, as we are anxious to concur in every respect with our brethren of the United Colonies, for our just rights and privileges, as far as our infant settlement and remote situation will admit of, we humbly expect and implore to be taken under the protection of the honorable Convention of the Colony of Virginia, of which we cannot help thinking ourselves still a part, and request your kind interposition in our behalf, that we may not suffer under the rigorous demands and impositions of the gentlemen styling themselves Proprietors, who, the better to effect their oppressive designs, have given them the color of a law, enacted The Passing of Transylvania 149 by a score of men, artfully picked from the few ad- venturers who went to see the country last summer, overawed by the presence of Mr. Henderson. "And that you would take such measures as your honors in your wisdom shall judge most expedient for restoring peace and harmony in our divided settlement; or, if your honors apprehend that our cause comes more properly before the honorable the General Congress, that you would in your good- ness recommend the same to your worthy delegates to espouse it as the cause of the Colony. And your petitioners will ever, etc." * The reference to the "score of men artfully picked" was hardly compHmentary to the Transylvania House of Delegates, nor was it altogether candid, seeing that the foremost signer of the memorial, James Harrod, was himself a member of the House of Dele- gates. But it cannot be denied that the memorialists had good cause for grievance, and it is no less certain that in putting their names to their petition they signed the death warrant of Transylvania. Henderson, hearing that they had appealed to the Convention, knew that the long-dreaded day of battle had dawned, and hastened to submit a counter- memorial in behalf of the Company. This was about the middle of June, 1776, and even while he was writing it the insurgent Transylvanians were taking ^ From the "Journal of the Virginia Convention," 150 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road a decisive step to repudiate their allegiance. Begin- ning June 6 an eight-day election was held at Harrods- town for the choosing of two delegates to the Virginia Convention from "West Fincastle," as Harrod and his associates now designated Transylvania. The choice fell on George Rogers Clark and John Gabriel Jones, who soon set out for Williamsburg, at that time the capital of the Old Dominion, bearing with them a second petition in which the Proprietors were attacked more bitterly than before, and the Con- vention was urged to organize "West Fincastle'' as a county of Virginia. Before Clark and Jones reached Williamsburg the Convention had adjourned after having ap- pointed a commission to take evidence and report on the validity of the Company's title to Transylvania. Henderson, at bay, fought desperately for a favorable verdict, but all his efforts were unavailing. His last chance for success may be said to have been blotted out with the adoption, by the Continental Congress, of the Declaration of Independence. Under the new order of things there was no room whatever for a proprietary government on the soil of America. December, 1776, during the first session of the recently created State Legislature of Virginia, an act was passed organizing Kentucky County out of the domain destined at no distant day to blossom into the State of Kentucky, and including within the i The Passing of Transylvania 151 boundaries of the new county the delectable realm which Henderson had bought from the Cherokees. With this act Transylvania became only a memory, and the ambitious project of the Transylvania part- ners was ended forevermore. Virginia, however, did not condemn them to suffer utter loss. Nov. 4, 1778, the House of Delegates resolved that "as the said Richard Henderson and Company have been at very great expense in making the said purchase and in settling the said lands — by which this Commonwealth is likely to receive great advantages, by increasing its inhabitants and estab- lishing a barrier against the Indians — it is just and reasonable to allow the said Richard Henderson and Company a compensation for their trouble and expense." Acting on this resolution, the Virginia General Assembly voted the Proprietors a grant of two hundred thousand acres of land in Kentucky, and a similar grant was subsequently made to them by North Carolina, whose limits embraced a portion of the Cherokee cession. Strangely enough, while not spurning these donations Henderson refused to acknowledge defeat, and long nursed the vain hope that he would in some way regain the vast region thus wrested from him. We shall once more encounter him, somewhat chastened by his Transylvania experiences, but still aggressively keen for power and for wealth. » 152 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road In Transylvania — or what had been Transyl- vania — there were few who felt any sympathy for the luckless Proprietors. But Daniel Boone was one of the few. He saw in Henderson not a grasping, law-defying land speculator, but the good angel who had enabled him to make his home in the land of his heart's desire. And however strongly he resented and deplored the avaricious poHcy of Henderson's Company, he was not ingrate enough to forget the generous gift its members had made to him in reward for his road-building. At the moment, however, not even Boone could spare much thought to the misfortunes of the Tran- sylvania Proprietors. For by the time the Blue Grass settlements learned of Virginia's decision, their people were in the midst of war's alarms. CHAPTER X WAR-TIME IN KENTUCKY THE Struggle between the red man and the white for possession of Kentucky began in the sum- mer of 1776, with a dramatic prelude. One July afternoon three girls — Jemima, the second daughter of Daniel Boone, and Elizabeth and Fanny, the daughters of Boone's old friend and fellow-road- maker, Richard Callaway — left Boonesborough for a boat-ride on the Kentucky. It was a warm day, and the girls, whose ages ranged from fourteen to sixteen, after paddling a short distance from the fort, allowed their canoe to drift idly with the current, which gradually carried them towards the opposite bank. They had no thought of danger, for not an Indian had been seen near Boonesborough since the McQuinney-Saunders affair of the previous winter. As ill luck would have it, however, a party of young warriors, refusing to abide longer by the treaty forced upon them at the conclusion of Lord Dun- more's War, had left the Shawnee towns only a few days before, and had crossed the Ohio into Kentucky, with the intention of dispersing through the settle- 153 154 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road ments and inflicting what damage they could. Five of these Indians, bedecked in war-plumes and hideous in war-paint, had approached Boonesborough unob- served, and were in hiding near the river's edge at a point where the current carried the drifting canoe close to shore. As it swept towards the bushes among which they lay concealed, one of them slipped noiselessly into the water, waded out, and, almost before the terrified girls reahzed his purpose, drew their frail craft within reach of his companions. Tradition has it that the oldest girl, Elizabeth Callaway, made a brave re- sistance, using her paddle as a weapon, and with it gashing an Indian's head to the bone. But she was quickly disarmed and dragged up the river-bank to where her sister and Jemima Boone, still shrieking with fear and horror, had already been carried. By gestures more expressive than any words could have been, the Indians bade them cease their cries and save their strength for the long march to the Shawnee towns, threatening instant death to them if they faltered on the way. The girls knew that this was no idle threat, for they had often heard of the ruthlessness with which Indians when returning from a successful raid were wont to slaughter, with- out regard to sex or age, any captive unable to keep up with the swift pace they usually set. Stifling their sobs, they followed the Shawnees without a murmur I War-time in Kentucky 155 through clover field and prairie meadow, cane-brake and maple grove, every step carrying them farther from home. But, with a resourcefulness that proved them true daughters of pioneer fathers and mothers, they stealthily endeavored to leave a well-marked trail for those who they felt certain would soon be speeding to their rescue. Wherever the ground was at all soft, they trod heavily in it, and at every opportunity they secretly tore from their clothing little pieces of cloth which they fastened to the thorny bushes of the surrounding undergrowth. It was late in the afternoon before they were missed and the cause of their disappearance made known to the people of Boonesborough through discovery of the empty canoe and the marks of the struggle on the river-bank. Two parties of settlers at once started in hot pursuit. One, consisting of a dozen or more mounted men under Richard Callaway, headed direct to the Licking River, hoping to intercept the Shawnees at the ford of the lower Blue Lick. The other party, smaller and on foot, followed their trail from the Kentucky. It was led by Boone and John Floyd, who had left St. Asaph and was then living at Boonesborough, and it included five other men, three of whom — Richard Henderson's brother Samuel, Richard Callaway's son Flanders, and John Holder — were in love with the captured girls. 156 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road Darkness overtook them before they had gone more than five miles, but at dawn the pursuit was renewed. That day they covered thirty miles, noting with sat- isfaction the torn fragments of cloth, which told them that the girls were keeping up their strength and courage. Early next morning, after travelling two miles more, which brought them within two or three miles of the upper Blue Lick, Boone and his companions noticed a thin line of smoke curHng upwards through the air. Advancing cautiously, so that the Indians should not be aware of their presence in time to tomahawk the helpless captives, they soon came upon the Shawnees grouped about a fire at which they were cooking buffalo meat for breakfast. A little distance off sat Elizabeth Callaway, with her sister and Jemima Boone on the ground beside her, their heads resting in her lap. It was evident that the Indians imagined they had thrown off all pursuit, and no less evident that the younger girls were thoroughly exhausted and could not possibly travel much farther. At a signal from Boone the pursuers closed in upon the encampment. But let one of them — John Floyd — tell the story of the rescue in his own words, as he afterwards described it in a letter to his friend. Colonel William Preston of Virginia. "We discovered each other nearly at the same War-time in Kentucky 157 time," Floyd wrote to Preston, "four of us fired, and all rushed on them, which prevented them from carrying away anything except one shot-gun without ammunition. Mr. Boone and myself had a pretty fair shot just as they began to move off. I am well convinced I shot one through, and the one he shot dropped his gun ; mine had none. The place was very thick with canes, and being so much elated on recovering the three broken-hearted little girls, prevented our making further search. We sent them off without their moccasins, and not one of them with so much as a knife or tomahawk." ^ Whatever idea the settlers may have had that this was a solitary outrage similar to the December inci- dent, was dispelled shortly after the rescuers returned to Boonesborough. Besides the original four settle- ments of Transylvania, the country to the north as well as to the south of the Kentucky had by this time become dotted with stations and single cabins put up ^ Samuel Henderson married his sweetheart, the plucky Eliza- beth Callaway, three weeks later, this being the first marriage in Kentucky. Some interesting details have been preserved. The ceremony took place in a Boonesborough cabin, Daniel Boone officiating by virtue of having been commissioned a justice of the peace. There was dancing to fiddle music by the light of buffalo tallow candles, and the guests were treated to the first watermelons grown at Boonesborough. At a later date Flanders Callaway be- came the husband of Jemima Boone, and John Holder, who devel- oped into a redoubtable Indian fighter, married Fanny Callaway. 158 Daniel Boone 'and the Wilderness Road by '* improvers" from the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Mc- Clelland's Station on the Elkhorn, Hinkson's Station on the Licking, and Huston's Station on the site of the present-day Paris were the most important set- tlements between the Kentucky and the Ohio. South of the Kentucky the greatest activity was in the country about Harrodstown and Boiling Spring, and along Logan's Branch of the Wilderness Road. The Transylvanians themselves had spread out for many miles, some, like the McAfees, uniting to lay the foundations of new settlements, and others, among whom was Michael Stoner, the companion of Boone's memorable ride to the Falls of the Ohio, removing in little groups of three or four to spy out the land and build homes in particularly desirable locations. Now, in July of 1776, fugitives came flying from every quarter to the larger settlements, bringing with them dismal tidings of Indian depredations. Men had been murdered, horses and cattle stolen, buildings burned. On the very day that Boone and Floyd arrived with the rescued girls, a party of fugi- tives from Hinkson's Station galloped into Boones- borough, stayed overnight, and in the morning started for Virginia by way of the Wilderness Road, taking with them ten of the inhabitants of Boones- borough, whom they had infected with their panic. War-time in Kentucky 159 They were soon followed by others, despite the en- treaties of Boone, Callaway, Harrod, Logan, and kindred fearless souls, who refused to flee, and labored day and night to strengthen their defences. To add to the general alarm, word was received that the Cherokees had attacked the Watauga settle- ments and purposed, if successful, moving northward into Kentucky. This was the signal for a fresh panic and a still greater exodus across the mountains. But not all could go, and not all wished to go, and many of those who did wish themselves well out of Kentucky felt that duty constrained them to remain. "I want to return as much as any man can do,'' Floyd candidly confessed to his friend Preston, "but if I leave the country now, there is scarcely one single man who will not follow the example. When I think of the deplorable condition a few helpless families are likely to be in, I conclude to sell my life as dearly as I can in their defence rather than make an igno- minious escape." In the sad years that followed many a man and woman had occasion to bless John Floyd for this noble resolution.* ^ Floyd, however, was not in Kentucky throughout its seven years of almost perpetual warfare. He had been appointed offi- cial surveyor for the Transylvania Company, and in the autumn of 1776 Henderson summoned him to Williamsburg, where he re- mained until the Virginia Legislature passed the act absorbing Transylvania. He then fitted out a privateer to destroy British i6o Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road Had the Shawnees taken advantage of the demora- lized condition into which the Kentuckians were thrown by their unexpected appearance, there is every reason to believe that they could have wiped out the settlements, and put a stop to westward ex- pansion until after the War for Independence, besides clearing the way for the British, with whom they later became aUied, to deliver deadly rear attacks against the insurgent colonists. But instead of concentrating their efforts in successive assaults upon the stations where those who remained had taken refuge, — Boonesborough, Harrodstown, and Mc- Clelland's, — they contented themselves throughout the summer and autumn in roaming about the coun- try, destroying the deserted settlements and cabins, and slaying all who happened to fall into their hands. This gave the pioneers a breathing space, enabled them to mature plans for defence, lay in supplies, and shipping, and did considerable damage before being made a pris- oner of war. Escaping after a year's imprisonment, he was smug- gled across the English Channel to France, where, it is said, Ben- jamin Franklin supplied him with means to reach Virginia. Once in America again, he hurried back to Kentucky, did splendid ser- vice under George Rogers Clark, and by his daring became known throughout the West. In April, 1783, while riding with his brother Charles, he was shot from ambush by an Indian and died a few hours afterwards, at the early age of thirty-three. He was a splen- did specimen of the American pioneer, and should find a place in any gallery of portraits of heroes of the early West. War-time in Kentucky l6l despatch messengers to Williamsburg, imploring aid from Virginia. Had it not been for the presence of George Rogers Clark in Williamsburg it seems altogether likely that these messengers would have found their journey fruitless, for the Virginians were so preoccupied with the urgent problems raised by the War for Inde- pendence that they at first paid scant attention to the frantic appeals of the men from the West. But when Clark heard of the danger threatening his fellow-Transylvanians, the situation rapidly changed. Clark, it will be remembered, had been elected a delegate with John Gabriel Jones to state the case of the Transylvanians against Richard Henderson and Company. Imperious, impetuous, and forceful, he had all along taken the position that Transylvania should approach Virginia in an independent, not a suppliant, spirit, and when he discovered that the authorities were disposed to let the Westerners shift for themselves, he adopted a tone of haughty defi- ance. If Transylvania, he said in effect, were not worth saving, it was not worth claiming, and if it were compelled to save itself, it assuredly would not ac- knowledge Virginia's sovereignty. The threat had the desired result. Late in the summer an initial supply of powder and lead was sent to Boone, — thus tacitly recognized as com- mander-in-chief of the defending forces, — and a i62 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road further grant of five hundred pounds of powder was afterwards made, which Clark and Jones undertook to carry by flatboat down the Ohio. Accompanied only by seven daredevil borderers, who readily engaged to serve as boatmen, notwith- standing that the Indians were known to be keeping a close watch on the river, they set out from Pitts- burg and after many adventures landed their precious cargo on an island not far from the site of the modern Maysville, hiding it in the woods until they could get help in carrying it to the settlements. On every side, as they struck cautiously across country, they found evidences of the blight that had fallen on Kentucky, and they frequently had proof — in the way of smouldering camp-fires and fresh trails — that war-parties were even then hovering about. But by dint of the woodcraft in which most of them were masters, they avoided detection and reached McClelland's Station, the only occupied settlement north of the Kentucky River. Here, per- haps for the first time, Clark met a man scarcely less famous than Daniel Boone in the camp-fire talk of the border. This was Simon Kenton, only twenty-one years old, but already renowned as guide, scout, and Indian fighter — a fair-haired giant of six feet, with nerves of steel and the sunniest of dispositions. Like so many of the makers of the early West, Kenton was Simon Kenton From painting by Lewis Morgan, owned by Colonel Reuben T. Durrett War-time in Kentucky 163 Virginia born, and of the restless, aggressive Scotch- Irish stock. He had fled from his native settlement when a lad of sixteen, in consequence of a hand-to- hand frontier duel in which he left for dead his suc- cessful rival in a youthful love afi^air. From that time forward he had been an adventur- ous, danger-defying wanderer in the wilds of western Pennsylvania and Virginia, penetrating as far as the mouth of the Kentucky. During Lord Dunmore's War he acted as a spy for both Lord Dunmore and Andrew Lewis, the conqueror of Point Pleasant, and earned the venomous hatred of the Indians for the skill with which he gained information of their movements and intentions. After the war he defi- nitely removed to Kentucky, clearing land and build- ing a cabin near Maysville at about the time the foundations of Boonesborough were being laid in the Blue Grass country farther south. He is credited with having raised the first crop of corn planted and harvested by white men in northern Kentucky. The winter of 1775-76 he passed at Hinkson's Station on the Licking, and when that settlement was abandoned, owing to the outbreakof Indian hostilities, he removed to McClelland's. As in Lord Dunmore's War he was now employed to spy on the Indians, and many pioneers owed their lives to the vigilance with which he tracked marauding parties of red men and brought timely warning of their approach. 164 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road Besides Kenton, Clark found at McClelland's only half a dozen fighting men, or too few to provide a sufficiently strong escort for the ammunition. It was arranged that Kenton should pilot him to Har- rodstown for reenforcements, while Jones and the boatmen remained at McClelland's, pending their return. Had this programme been followed all would have been well. As it was, the departure of Clark and Kenton was the signal for a display of rashness that led to the first pitched battle and the first serious reverse of the Indian wars in Kentucky. Possibly because he wished to enhance his repu- tation for courage, possibly because he underesti- mated the fighting qualities of the foe, Jones per- suaded the boatmen and some of the people of McClelland's to join him in an immediate attempt to bring in the hidden powder. As was too often the case at that time, no precautions were taken to guard against a surprise; no scouts were sent ahead, no watch kept for unusual sights and sounds that might indicate the presence of an enemy. Yet from the moment Jones and his escort left the protecting pali- sades of the settlement their every step was dogged, and when they halted for the noonday meal, the lurking foe silently stole ahead to lie in ambush for them. Jones was the first to perish, falling dead with a bullet in his heart; a second man was killed, and War-time in Kentucky 165 two others were taken prisoners to undergo the lin- gering tortures of death at the stake. The rest, cutting their way through the living wall that sought to bar them from safety, fled back to McClelland's, whence a messenger was soon speeding to Harrods- town, carrying the tale of folly and disaster and an urgent appeal for help. In response, Clark, Kenton, and a number of volunteers hastened to the station on the Elkhorn, drove off the Indians after a fight in which several whites were killed, and in the opening days of the new year secured the powder which had been the cause of so much bloodshed, and distributed it among the de- fenders of Boonesborough and Harrodstown, McClel- land's Station being abandoned because of its remote location from the Transylvania settlements. Now the war entered into a new phase, and one of far more serious import to the brave men and women who were so desperately striving to maintain their foothold in Kentucky. Beginning with the early spring of i ^^^^ not only the Shawnees, but many other tribes abandoned all pretence of neutrality in the con- flict between the colonists and the mother country, and openly sided with the latter, being spurred to bloody aggression by the rich presents and glowing promises of Henry Hamilton, the British lieutenant- governor of the Northwestern region, whose head- quarters were at Detroit. 1 66 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road It no longer was safe for even fairly strong parties of settlers to move about Kentucky, and all travel in and out of the country, whether along the Wilderness Road or by the Ohio River, came practically to an end. In the single year 1777 Harrodstown was besieged three times and Boonesborough twice, and when free from open attack, both places were so closely invested that, in the daytime at all events, it was next to impossible for the settlers to enter or leave the stockades. Thus besides severing the slender threads of communication which united the Kentucky settlements with the settlements of the East, hundreds of miles away, the Indians frequently succeeded in isolating Boonesborough and Harrods- town from each other, although they were less than fifty miles apart. So serious did the situation become, owing to a shortage in the food supply, that hunters like Kenton and Boone were obhged to creep out after night-fall, travel long distances before venturing to seek game, and await the return of darkness in order to be able to smuggle in the food thus stealthily won. It was in very truth a starvation-time in Kentucky, Yet when the opportunity offered, as it did more than once, for the settlers to take their wives and children and follow those who had fled to safety the previous year, they stubbornly refused to leave. "Brother," a chieftain had prophetically told i War-time in Kentucky 167 Boone, at the signing of the Sycamore Shoals Treaty, "it is a fine land we sell to you, but I fear you will find it hard to hold/' They were finding it hard to hold, but they had resolved to hold it at any cost. Heroes and heroines all of them, this first year of systematic warfare was marked by many romantic episodes bringing out in clear relief the innate great- ness of the men and women who faced the tawny aUies of the British in the border battles of the Revo- lution. As striking an instance as any occurred dur- ing a siege of St. Asaph, which had been reoccupied in February by the courageous Benjamin Logan and was now better known as Logan's Fort than by the name it had borne when Transylvania was in its prime. One morning, about the middle of May, the women of the station were milking outside the stockade, pro- tected by a small detachment from the garrison, which did not number more than fifteen men all told. During the night a force of Shawnees had concealed themselves in a near-by cane-brake, and at the first favorable moment they fired upon the guard. One man was killed outright and two were wounded, one of whom succeeded in escaping to the stockade, where the women had instantly taken refuge, while the other. Burr Harrison, after running a few yards, fell to the ground completely disabled. From a cabin port-hole his wife beheld him lying helpless, 1 68 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road and in a frenzy of grief begged that he be rescued before the Indians should rush up and despatch him. For a moment no one answered her appeal. The Shawnees' first volley had reduced the effective force in the fort to twelve men, and it seemed madness to expose the survivors to further loss. But as she con- tinued to lament and wring her hands, Logan, always chivalrous and devoid of fear, called for volun- teers to aid him in an attempt to carry in the wounded man. One stepped forward, John Martin, and to- gether they threw open the stockade gate and leaped towards the groaning Harrison. Their appearance was the signal for a second volley from the Indians, who were still under cover. Ap- palled by the leaden hail, Martin turned and sprang back within the fort; but Logan, undaunted, dashed on alone, passed safely through the storm of bullets, lifted Harrison from the ground, threw him across his burly shoulders, and, scarcely slackening his speed beneath the heavy burden, beat a triumphant retreat to the stockade. Nor was this all. Unable to carry the fort by storm, or to "smoke out" its inmates by setting fire to it, the Indians settled down to a patient siege. Before long the defenders found themselves short of ammunition, with apparently no means of replen- ishing their supply, as both Harrodstown and Boones- borough were too hard pressed to spare either powder I War-time in Kentucky 169 or lead. Again Logan rose to the occasion. Sad- dling the best horse he possessed, he slipped undis- covered through the enemy's lines, and made for the distant settlements of the Watauga country. It was impossible to travel by w^ay of the Wilder- ness Road, so closely were the Indians guarding it; and the alternative was a hazardous journey through a network of Indian trails and buffalo traces, in which even the best-trained woodsman might lose his way and perish. But Logan did not pause to contemplate the difficulties he would have to over- come. Riding each day from dawn until dark, fording streams, guiding his horse up and down rocky heights, crashing recklessly through brush- wood and cane-brake, he reached the hamlets on the Holston within a week, and within another week was back at his fort, bearing the glad assurance that an ammunition caravan was on the road and that a hundred mihtiamen from the Virginia frontier were hastening to the rehef of the beleaguered Kentucky stations. Simon Kenton was another who proved his sterling worth in that grim year 1777. Making his head- quarters at Boonesborough he spent most of his time in the open, flitting like a will-o'-the-wisp from one Indian camp to another, eavesdropping near the council-fire, and keeping the settlers thoroughly informed of the enemy's plans. Once, when for 170 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road some reason he had been detained at Boonesborough, the Indians contrived to approach and attack it be- fore the defenders suspected their presence; but, as things turned out, this gave Kenton an opportunity of performing what was perhaps the most briUiant deed of his entire career. There were only twenty-two riflemen in Boones- borough at the time, while the attacking force com- prised from fifty to one hundred warriors. But, as was their custom, the Indians preferred to rely on strategy rather than on open assault, and most of them remained hidden in the weeds and long grass near the stockade, leaving a mere handful to act as a decoy in enticing the settlers to give chase to them. The trick was successful. Boone, Kenton, and a majority of the garrison rushed out in hot pursuit, and as soon as they were some little distance from the fort the Indians in hiding rose to cut off their retreat. Realizing the nature of the trap into which they had fallen, Boone shouted to his men to wheel about and make a dash for the gate, firing as they ran. A minute more, and they were in deadly hand-to-hand conflict. Isaac Hite, John Todd, Michael Stoner, and other notables of the early Transylvania days fell, more or less seriously wounded; and with them fell Boone, his leg broken by a bullet. Whooping in triumph at the thought that the noted War-time in Kentucky 171 "Captain Boone" was in his power, a tall, sinewy brave sprang at him with uplifted tomahawk. Ken- ton, who had been fighting valiantly, and had already killed two Indians, chanced to catch a glimpse of the impending tragedy — - saw Boone half-prostrate on the ground, his arm raised above his head to ward off the death-stroke. With lightning-Hke rapidity Ken- ton turned, raised his rifle, pressed it against the war- rior's breast, and discharged it. Then, stooping, he lifted Boone and bore him swiftly to the fort; after- wards returning to plunge into the fight once more. When the battle was over, and the Indians had been driven off, Boone sent for Kenton and knighted him in backwoods fashion. "Well, Simon,'* said he, "you have behaved like a man — you are a fine fellow." Few words and simple words, but coming from such a source they amounted to a certificate of merit which would forever establish Kenton's reputa- tion. For Boone's preeminence in the defence of Ken- tucky was by this time universally recognized. His readiness to encounter danger, his resourcefulness in surmounting the greatest obstacles, — he even learned the art of making gunpowder, — and his constant cheerfulness endeared him to all and made him the inspiration of all. In the words of one well ac- quainted with his career, he was looked upon as an oracle, whose every utterance was to be obeyed. 172 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road It would be quite incorrect, though, to describe Boone as a great military genius. He was not that. His distinction lay in the fact that he was supremely equipped to conduct operations in the kind of war- fare in which the Kentuckians were then engaged. He knew the red man and the red man's ways, and besides being a splendid fighter he was the peer of the most wily chieftain in cunning and dissimulation. Other things being equal, he could be depended on to beat the Indian at his own game as could no other borderer of his generation, with the possible excep- tion of Simon Kenton. But he was deficient in one quality without which no commander may hope to excel — the penetrating vision, almost equivalent to prescience, that impels to drastic, far-reaching action in a time of crisis. Superb in defensive fighting, he was less conspicuous when the occasion demanded a vigorous offence. For this reason he was eventually overshadowed, from the military point of view, by the man who had dragooned the authorities of Virginia into lending the Kentuckians a helping hand — George Rogers Clark. CHAPTER XI THE CAMPAIGNING OF GEORGE ROGERS CLARK WHILE Boone was battling with bull-dog tenacity at the settlement that bore his name, Clark was at Harrodstown, rendering mag- nificent assistance in the defence of that station and carefully maturing a plan whereby he hoped to put an end for all time to the Indian invasions. As yet it was not generally known that the continual struggle with the Indians had its origin in anything other than the natural wrath of the savages at the loss of their favorite hunting-grounds. But Clark, a man of the broadest imagination and the keenest insight, intuitively understood that the true source of hostilities was to be found in the adverse influence radiating from the Northwestern forts and trading- stations which had been established by the French as part of their scheme for New World empire, and now were British possessions. He rightly suspected that all of them — and es- pecially Detroit in western Canada, and Kaskaskia and Vincennes in the IlHnois country — were hot- 173 174 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road beds in which the seeds of Indian hatred for the American borderers were assiduously cultivated. Could these posts but be wrested from the British, the problem of persuading or compelling the Indians to maintain peace would be greatly simplified, for they would be deprived of the moral and material support of their white allies. Moreover, as Clark saw it, the conquest of the country north of the Ohio was absolutely essential to the saving of Kentucky. Thus far the Kentuckians had held their ground, with practically no outside assistance; nor could they reasonably expect much aid, so great were the demands made upon the East- ern settlements by the exigencies of the protracted War for Independence. Yet without aid, or without a respite from the grinding pressure of the Indian onslaughts, the pioneers would in time be worn out, and would have to surrender or retreat. This would mean the complete abandonment of Kentucky, and its abandonment would mean the exposure of the entire Virginia frontier to the tomahawk, the scalp- ing-knife, and the torch. In this fact Clark saw his only chance for putting into execution an ambitious project that gradually took shape in his mind during the spring and summer of 1777. He would again visit WiUiamsburg, would depict to the men at the head of affairs the horrors certain to overwhelm border Virginia unless British The Campaigning of George Rogers Clark 175 activity among the Indians were checked, and would himself undertake to check it by the conquest of the Northwestern posts — which, as he would make it a point to remind the authorities, were situated in a region long claimed by Virginia under the terms of her all-embracing charter, and which would thus become doubly Virginia's by right of charter and by right of conquest. All that he should require would be official authorization for the organizing of an ex- pedition, and money to finance it. Everything else, from the recruiting to the fighting, he would engage to carry through without Virginia's aid. • He would march first of all against Kaskaskia, as being most conveniently located for attack from Kentucky; when Kaskaskia had fallen, he would assail the more northerly Cahokia and Vincennes and afterwards, as circumstances permitted, faraway Detroit. It might be objected that the way to Kas- kaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes lay through trackless forests and tangled prairies, by quagmires and over rushing streams — a country, in fine, of the most difficult travel, and teeming with bitterly hostile tribesmen. Clark would airily wave his hand, and assure the sceptical Virginians that all this was of small importance — the men of his army would be men whom nothing could daunt and nothing defeat. It was a dream such as could be conceived only by a rash, reckless adventurer, or by a man of true 176 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road genius, certain of his ability to command success. Clark was no mere adventurer. When his vision of conquest first began to assume definite form, he calmly set about ascertaining its feasibility. He took no one into his confidence, — excepting possibly Simon Kenton and James Harrod, with both of whom he was on the most intimate terms, — but sent for two young frontiersmen and employed them to visit the Illinois country in the guise of hunters and traders, examine its resources and defences, and in particular discover the sentiments of the inhabitants of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes with respect to the contest between Great Britain and the Ameri- can colonies. Most of the people of these three set- tlements were French or of French descent, and it was Clark's hope that they would at most prove lukewarm in their British allegiance, and would offer no very serious opposition if an American force were sent against them. The report brought back by his spies confirmed this idea. The commandants and garrisons of the Illinois posts, they informed him, were loyal to the British interest, and took every opportunity of incit- ing the Indians to depredations in Kentucky. But most of the inhabitants — a care-free, easy-going Creole population, whose life was made up chiefly of feasting and dancing — viewed the struggle with entire indifference, heedless which side won as long I The Campaigning of George Rogers Clark 177 as their butterfly existence was not disturbed. They had been taught, however, to regard the American backwoodsmen as devils in human form, far more cruel than any Indian; a piece of news that was not unwelcome to Clark, since he readily perceived how he might profit from it by working on the fears of the French and then gaining their affection by un- expected leniency. Satisfied that he was not attempting the impos- sible, he left Harrodstown on October i, 1777, and after a tedious journey over the Wilderness Road and across the mountains of southwestern Virginia, reached Williamsburg early in November. The fiery Patrick Henry — another Scotch-Irishman, and not unhke Clark in vigor, audacity, and sweep of imagination — was then governor of Virginia, and listened with rapt enthusiasm when the Kentuckian sought him out and unfolded the details of his daring plan. But, Henry declared, Virginia's means were exhausted, she could spare neither troops nor money for even so promising an enterprise. With the persistence characteristic of the men of the West — and without which they could never have won the West — Clark plied him with new arguments, fervid entreaties. The ardent Henry, willingly per- suaded but at a loss to know how he could further Clark's desires, turned for advice to some trusty counsellors — Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, 178 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road and George Wythe. They, too, were won over by the Kentuckian's eloquence, his air of confidence, his tone of certitude. Secrecy being indispensable for the success of the enterprise, — since, if an inkling of Clark's intentions got abroad, messengers would be hurried by the British to put the Illinois commandants on their guard, — it was arranged that the sum of twelve hundred pounds should be privately advanced to him, and that he should be given two sets of instruc- tions by Governor Henry. One of these, intended to be made public, simply authorized him to raise three hundred and fifty mihtiamen for the defence of Kentucky; the other, contained in a private letter, directed him to march against the posts in the North- west. He was also given the commission of colonel. So much time had been consumed by these nego- tiations that it was not until the end of January, 1778, that Clark was able to begin the task of raising his httle army. He knew that he could not look for many recruits from among his fellow-Kentuckians, because no matter how strongly they might desire to serve under him they would be obhged to stay at home and protect the settlements; and accordingly he sought for followers from among the people of the less exposed frontier region of the AUeghanies. Even there he found the greatest difficulty in secur- ing volunteers, such was the dread of an Indian in- iH The Campaigning of George Rogers Clark 179 vasion, and in the end he was obHged to set out ac- companied by a force of only one hundred and fifty — most of them, however, men Hke himself, strong- limbed, quick-witted, and of lion's courage and endurance. Voyaging down the Ohio in flatboats, and main- taining a constant watch to prevent a surprise from the Indian-infested forest through which the noble river flowed, the expedition safely reached the Falls of the Ohio, May 27, 1778. Here Clark landed and built a fort, and here his following was strengthened by the arrival of Simon Kenton and several other Ken- tuckians, as well as a company of volunteers who had marched over the Wilderness Road from the settle- ments of southwestern Virginia. Now, for the first time, the true purpose of the enterprise was disclosed to the backwoods army. There were a few who deserted rather than hazard their lives in what they regarded as a mad and suici- dal business. But the great majority hailed it with enthusiasm, and swore to follow Clark wherever he might see fit to lead them. To increase their en- thusiasm came news of the French Alliance, which they at once interpreted as rendering easier the task of pacifying the inhabitants of the old French posts. June 24, work on the fort having been completed, they once more embarked and voyaged swiftly down the Ohio to a point a few miles below the mouth of i8o Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road the Tennessee. The boats were now abandoned, and a march begun in a northwesterly direction. Kaskaskia, which Clark intended attacking first, stood in the angle formed by the juncture of the river of that name with the Mississippi ; and it would have been much easier to have made the entire journey by water. But Clark rightly feared discovery if he attempted to ascend the Mississippi; and, in fact, he learned from some American hunters, whom chance brought to his camp on the lower Ohio, that the French commandant at Kaskaskia had been warned that some hostile move was contemplated against that town, and had posted a number of sen- tinels on the banks of the Mississippi to sound an immediate alarm at the approach of any armed force. Besides giving him this valuable information, the hunters offered to guide Clark to Kaskaskia by the shortest possible overland route. Scouts were sent ahead, both to kill game for pro- visions and to make sure that no wandering French- man or Indian should escape with tidings of the coming of the invaders. Not an ounce of superflu- ous baggage was taken along, and not a man lagged behind when once the command to start had been given, as every one realized that the only chance for success lay in arriving at their destination in time to catch the garrison unawares. Progress was slow, however, for forty or fifty miles, as the country was 1 The Campaigning of George Rogers Clark i8i heavily timbered, with a dense undergrowth through which a trail had to be cut; and after entering the open prairies that stretched to the north of the forest, some delay was caused by the principal guide losing the way. But just at sunset of July 4 Clark and his weary but undaunted followers — they had marched the last two days "without sustenance" — found themselves on the bank of the Kaskaskia, about three miles above the town. The mere fact that they had not been attacked was sufficient proof that their presence was still un- known to the garrison. Still, before giving battle, Clark wished to learn if possible the exact state of affairs. Leaving the main body to follow more leisurely, he pushed ahead with a small detachment until he reached a farm-house a mile or so from Kaskaskia. Its Creole occupants were at once made prisoners but treated kindly, and without much urg- ing they told him what he was anxious to learn. There were, it appeared, comparatively few Ind- ians at Kaskaskia, but a great many French, most of whom had been well armed and drilled by the commandant, an officer named Philippe de Roche- blave. The defences of the fort had been strength- ened, and repeated requests had been sent to Gov- ernor Hamilton at Detroit, begging him to reenforce the militia by a regiment of regulars. Thus far no reenforcements had arrived, and Rocheblave had 1 82 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road latterly relaxed his vigilance, believing that the early rumors of an invasion must have been unfounded. It was quite possible that entrance might be gained not merely into the town, which stood to the north of the fort, but also into the fort itself, before any alarm would be given. Thus reassured, and guided by the Creoles, Clark marched his troops back to the river, where boats were found and a crossing effected. Night had set in, but the moon and stars gave light sufficient for a rapid advance. Just before reaching Kaskaskia, Clark again divided his "army," selecting twelve or fifteen to continue with him to the fort, and ordering the rest to disperse silently through the town in groups of four or five, ready to act as soon as they heard sounds of conflict. Both town and fort were in complete darkness,^ and the absence of sentinels testified to the feeling of security with which the inhabitants had gone to rest. But, as Clark and his little band drew near the fort gate, * Modern historical research seems to have completely demol- ished the romantic and well-known tradition in which Clark is represented as having arrived at Kaskaskia during the progress of a ball given by the officers of the fort and as having made his way unnoticed to the ball-room, where he grimly bade the revellers continue their dancing, "but to remember that they now danced under Virginia and not Great Britain." For a criticism of this legendary version, see Dr. Thwaites's "How George Rogers Clark won the Northwest." The Campaigning of George Rogers Clark 183 which luckily was open, some keen-scented watch- dogs set up a noisy howling. Undeterred, the Americans rushed in, made direct for Rocheblave's house, broke through the door, and captured the commandant in an upper room. With whoops of triumph — which served both to terrorize the bewildered and already panic-stricken garrison, and as a signal to the force in the town — they brought Rocheblave downstairs, placed him under guard, and then overpowered and disarmed his subordinate officers. Meanwhile, yelling like de- mons, their fellow- Virginians came thundering through the streets, shouting to the people to keep indoors. In fifteen minutes they were masters of Kaskaskia without the firing of a gun. That night there was no sleep for either the con- querors or the conquered. The frightened Creoles, huddled together in their homes, spent the hours until morning on their knees, praying that God would preserve them. At daybreak Clark's men made a house-to-house search for arms, a proceeding which naturally intensified the prevailing terror. Clark's attitude, when a deputation waited on him to learn his intentions, was even more alarming. "Giving all for lost," he wrote to George Mason, one of the Virginia statesmen who had been so help- ful to him at Williamsburg, "their lives were all they could dare beg for, which they did with the greatest 184 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road servancy. They were willing to be slaves to save their families. I told them it did not suit me to give them an answer at that time, and they repaired to their houses, trembling as if they were led to exe- cution." ^ A little later, however, feeling that they had been sufficiently overawed, he called their leading men together, informed them of the alliance between France and the United States, and told them they would be free to come and go as they pleased, pro- vided only that they took an oath of allegiance to the Republic. All anxiety was at once forgotten in an ecstacy of rejoicing. Light-hearted — one might almost say irresponsible — creatures that they were, it mattered not one whit to the Kaskaskians under what flag they lived. They danced and sang, they decorated their cabins, and, in further token of their joy, erected in the streets curious little pavilions of leaves and flowers. Commandant Rocheblave alone remained ^ Clark's letter to Mason (dated Louisville, Nov. 19, 1779) is an invaluable document for the study of the conquest of the Northwest. It is printed in full, together with the public and pri- vate instructions given to Clark by Governor Henry, in No. 3 of the "Ohio Valley Historical Series." Copious extracts are quoted from it in Dr. Thwaites's "How George Rogers Clark won the Northwest." For a detailed account of Clark's campaign, see also Consul Wilshire Butterfield's " George Rogers Clark's Conquest of the Illinois and the Wabash Towns, 1778 and 1779." The Campaigning of George Rogers Clark 185 irreconcilable, and lest he should stir up trouble Clark soon packed him off to Virginia as a prisoner of war. But the crowning feature of Clark's policy of paci- fication was the assurance he gave the local priest, Father Pierre Gibault, that the people would be un- disturbed in the practice of their religion. Devout Catholics all of them, the Creoles thenceforward rallied about him with greater enthusiasm than ever, while Father Gibault, overwhelmed with aston- ishment and gratitude, blossomed forthwith into a zealous promoter of Clark's plans for the extension of the conquest to the neighboring town of Cahokia and the more distant Vincennes. Bidding some of his parishioners accompany a small party of Americans to Cahokia, and explain to the people of that place the great desirabiHty of offer- ing no resistance to the Americans, the worthy priest himself mounted a horse and rode to Vincennes, a journey of nearly two hundred miles. Early in August he was back with the welcome news that through his influence the American flag had been raised there, and Clark immediately sent one of his officers. Captain Leonard Helm, to take command of the Vincennes mihtia. In similar fashion he in- stalled Captain Joseph Bowman as commandant at Cahokia, he himself remaining at Kaskaskia. The problem of pacifying the Illinois Indians had 1 86 Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road still to be solved, but, by the aid of the Creoles and through a masterly exhibition of strength and tact on his own part, Clark was entirely successful in treating with them at a great council held at Cahokia. More serious was the difficulty caused by the desire of most of his followers, whose term of service had expired, to return to their homes. He well knew that, pending the arrival of fresh troops from Virginia, he could not afford to lose a man, as it was certain the British would make an attempt to regain the conquered posts. But his expostulations, entreaties, and promises of rich rewards fell on unheeding ears, nearly one hundred of the self-willed backwoodsmen refusing to reenlist, and marching hastily away. To fill their places Clark enlisted an equal number of young Creole volunteers, whom he drilled into really efficient soldiers. This work helped the time pass swiftly and agreeably. "Our troops," he wrote to Mason, "being all raw and undisciplined, you must be sensible of the pleasure I felt when haranguing them on parade, telling them my resolutions and the necessity of strict duty for our own preservation, etc., for them to return me for answer that it was their zeal for their country that induced them to engage in the service; that they were sensible of their situation and danger; that nothing could conduce more to their safety and happiness than good order, which they would try ;:,0^ ■ ^lH 0- Gi:(M