Pioneers of the Old Southwest Part 2

Chapter IV. The Pa.s.sing Of The French Peril

The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier which held back the settler with his plough and his rifle from following the trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond. Over the hills the French were lords of the land. The frontiersman had already felt their enmity through the torch and tomahawk of their savage allies. By his own strength alone he could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the hills; so he halted. But that power, by its unachievable desire to be overlord of two hemispheres, was itself to precipitate events which would open the westward road.

The recurring hour in the cycle of history, when the issue of Autocracy against Democracy cleaves the world, struck for the men of the eighteenth century as the second half of that century dawned. In our own day, happily, that issue has been perceived by the rank and file of the people. In those darker days, as France and England grappled in that conflict of systems which culminated in the Seven Years' War, the fundamental principles at stake were clear to only a handful of thinking men.

But abstractions, whether clear or obscure, do not cause amba.s.sadors to demand their pa.s.sports. The declaration of war awaits the overt act. Behold, then, how great a matter is kindled by a little fire! The casus belli between France and England in the Seven Years' War-the war which humbled France in Europe and lost her India and Canada-had to do with a small log fort built by a few Virginians in 1754 at the Forks of the Ohio River and wrested from them in the same year by a company of Frenchmen from Canada.

The French claimed the valley of the Ohio as their territory; the English claimed it as theirs. The dispute was of long standing. The French claim was based on discovery; the English claim, on the seato-sea charters of Virginia and other colonies and on treaties with the Six Nations. The French refused to admit the right of the Six Nations to dispose of the territory. The English were inclined to maintain the validity of their treaties with the Indians. Especially was Virginia so inclined, for a large share of the Ohio lay within her chartered domain.

The quarrel had entered its acute phase in 1749, when both the rival claimants took action to a.s.sert their sovereignty. The Governor of Canada sent an envoy, Celoron de Blainville, with soldiers, to take formal possession of the Ohio for the King of France. In the same year the English organized in Virginia the Ohio Company for the colonization of the same country; and summoned Christopher Gist, explorer, trader, and guide, from his home on the Yadkin and dispatched him to survey the land.

Then appeared on the scene that extraordinary man, Robert Dinwiddie, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, erstwhile citizen of Glasgow. His correspondence from Virginia during his seven years' tenure of office (1751-58) depicts the man with a vividness surpa.s.sing paint. He was as honest as the day-as honest as he was fearless and fussy. But he had no patience; he wanted things done and done at once, and his way was THE way to do them. People who did not think as he thought didn't THINK at all. On this drastic premise he went to work. There was of course continuous friction between him and the House of Burgesses. Dinwiddie had all a Scot's native talent for sarcasm. His letters, his addresses, perhaps in particular his addresses to the House, bristled with satirical thrusts at his opponents. If he had spelled out in full all the words he was so eager to write, he would have been obliged to lessen his output; so he used a shorthand system of his own, peculiar enough to be remarkable even though abbreviations were the rule in that day. Even the dignity of Kings he sacrificed to speed, and we find "His Majesty" abbreviated to "H M'y"; yet a smaller luminary known as "His Honor" fares better, losing only the last letter-"His Hono." "Ho." stands for "house" and "yt" for "that," "what," "it," and "anything else," as convenient. Many of his letters wind up with "I am ve'y much fatig'd." We know that he must have been!

It was a formidable task that confronted Dinwiddie-to possess and defend the Ohio. Christopher Gist returned in 1751, having surveyed the valley for the Ohio Company as far as the Scioto and Miami rivers, and in the following year the survey was ratified by the Indians. The Company's men were busy blazing trails through the territory and building fortified posts. But the French dominated the territory. They had built and occupied with troops Fort Le Boeuf on French Creek, a stream flowing into the Allegheny. We may imagine Dinwiddie's rage at this violation of British soil by French soldiers and how he must have sputtered to the young George Was.h.i.+ngton, when he summoned that officer and made him the bearer of a letter to the French commander at Fort Le Boeuf, to demand that French troops be at once withdrawn from the Ohio.

Was.h.i.+ngton made the journey to Fort Le Boeuf in December, 1753, but the mission of course proved fruitless. Dinwiddie then wrote to London urging that a force be sent over to help the colonies maintain their rights and, under orders from the Crown, suggested by himself, he wrote to the governors of all the other colonies to join with Virginia in raising troops to settle the owners.h.i.+p of the disputed territory. From Governor Dobbs of North Carolina he received an immediate response. By means of logic, sarcasm, and the entire force of his prerogatives, Dinwiddie secured from his own balking a.s.sembly 10,000 pounds with which to raise troops. From Maryland he obtained nothing. There were three prominent Marylanders in the Ohio Company, but-or because of this-the Maryland a.s.sembly voted down the measure for a military appropriation. On June 18, 1754, Dinwiddie wrote, with unusually full spelling for him:

"I am perswaded had His Majesty's Com'ds to the other Colonies been duely obey'd, and the necessary a.s.sistance given by them, the Fr. wou'd have long ago have been oblig'd entirely to have evacuated their usurp'd Possession of the King's Lands, instead of w'ch they are daily becoming more formidable, whilst every Gov't except No. Caro. has amus'd me with Expectations that have proved fruitless, and at length refuse to give any Supply, unless in such a manner as must render it ineffectual."

This saddened mood with its deliberate penmans.h.i.+p did not last long. Presently Dinwiddie was making a Round Robin of himself in another series of letters to Governors, Councilors, and a.s.semblymen, frantically beseeching them for "H. M'y's hono." and their own, and, if not, for "post'r'ty," to rise against the cruel French whose Indians were harrying the borders again and "Basely, like Virmin, stealing and carrying off the helpless infant"-as nice a simile, by the way, as any Sheridan ever put into the mouth of Mrs. Malaprop.

Dinwiddie saw his desires thwarted on every hand by the selfish spirit of localism and jealousy which was more rife in America in those days than it is today. Though the phrase "capitalistic war" had not yet been coined, the great issues of English civilization on this continent were befogged, for the majority in the colonies, by the trivial fact that the shareholders in the Ohio Company stood to win by a vigorous prosecution of the war and to lose if it were not prosecuted at all. The irascible Governor, however, proceeded with such men and means as he could obtain.

And now in the summer of 1754 came the "overt act" which precipitated the inevitable war. The key to the valley of the Ohio was the tongue of land at the Forks, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join their waters in the Beautiful River. This site-today Pittsburgh-if occupied and held by either nation would give that nation the command of the Ohio. Occupied it was for a brief hour by a small party of Virginians, under Captain William Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot a crude fort than the French descended upon them. What happened then all the world knows: how the French built on the captured site their great Fort Duquesne; how George Was.h.i.+ngton with an armed force, sent by Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French and Indians at Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he was compelled to surrender; how in the next year (1755) General Braddock arrived from across the sea and set out to take Fort Duquesne, only to meet on the way the disaster called "Braddock's Defeat"; and how, before another year had pa.s.sed, the Seven Years' War was raging in Europe, and England was allied with the enemies of France.

>From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises the figure of the young Was.h.i.+ngton. Twenty-three he was then, tall and spare and hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open. When Braddock fell, this Was.h.i.+ngton appeared. Reckless of the enemy's bullets, which spanged about him and pierced his clothes, he dashed up and down the lines in an effort to rally the panic-stricken redcoats. He was too late to save the day, but not to save a remnant of the army and bring out his own Virginians in good order. Whether among the stay-at-homes and voters of credits there were some who would have ascribed Was.h.i.+ngton's conduct on that day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders in the Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was their personal property or "private interest," history does not say. We may suppose so.

North Carolina, the one colony which had not "amus'd" the Governor of Virginia "with Expectations that proved fruitless," had voted 12,000 pounds for the war and had raised two companies of troops. One of these, under Edward Brice Dobbs, son of Governor Dobbs, marched with Braddock; and in that company as wagoner went Daniel Boone, then in his twenty-second year. Of Boone's part in Braddock's campaign nothing more is recorded save that on the march he made friends with John Findlay, the trader, his future guide into Kentucky; and that, on the day of the defeat, when his wagons were surrounded, he escaped by slas.h.i.+ng the harness, leaping on the back of one of his horses, and das.h.i.+ng into the forest.

Meanwhile the southern tribes along the border were comparatively quiet. That they well knew a colossal struggle between the two white races was pending and were predisposed to ally themselves with the stronger is not to be doubted. French influence had long been sifting through the formidable Cherokee nation, which still, however, held true in the main to its treaties with the English. It was the policy of the Governors of Virginia and North Carolina to induce the Cherokees to enter strongly into the war as allies of the English. Their efforts came to nothing chiefly because of the purely local and suicidal Indian policy of Governor Glen of South Carolina. There had been some dispute between Glen and Dinwiddie as to the right of Virginia to trade with the Cherokees; and Glen had sent to the tribes letters calculated to sow distrust of all other aspirants for Indian favor, even promising that certain settlers in the Back Country of North Carolina should be removed and their holdings restored to the Indians. These letters caused great indignation in North Carolina, when they came to light, and had the worst possible effect upon Indian relations. The Indians now inclined their ear to the French who, though fewer than the English, were at least united in purpose.

Governor Glen took this inauspicious moment to hold high festival with the Cherokees. It was the last year of his administration and apparently he hoped to win promotion to some higher post by showing his achievements for the fur trade and in the matter of new land acquired. He plied the Cherokees with drink and induced them to make formal submission and to cede all their lands to the Crown. When the chiefs recovered their sobriety, they were filled with rage at what had been done, and they remembered how the French had told them that the English intended to make slaves of all the Indians and to steal their lands. The situation was complicated by another incident. Several Cherokee warriors returning from the Ohio, whither they had gone to fight for the British, were slain by frontiersmen. The tribe, in accordance with existing agreements, applied to Virginia for redress-but received none.

There was thus plenty of powder for an explosion. Governor Lyttleton, Glen's successor, at last flung the torch into the magazine. He seized, as hostages, a number of friendly chiefs who were coming to Charleston to offer tokens of good will and forced them to march under guard on a military tour which the Governor was making (1759) with intent to overawe the savages. When this expedition reached Prince George, on the upper waters of the Savannah, the Indian hostages were confined within the fort; and the Governor, satisfied with the result of his maneuver departed south for Charleston. Then followed a tragedy. Some Indian friends of the imprisoned chiefs attacked the fort, and the commander, a popular young officer, was treacherously killed during a parley. The infuriated frontiersmen within the fort fell upon the hostages and slew them all-twenty-six chiefs-and the Indian war was on.

If all were to be told of the struggle which followed in the Back Country, the story could not be contained in this book. Many brave and resourceful men went out against the savages. We can afford only a pa.s.sing glance at one of them. Hugh Waddell of North Carolina was the most brilliant of all the frontier fighters in that war. He was a young Ulsterman from County Down, a born soldier, with a special genius for fighting Indians, although he did not grow up on the border, for he arrived in North Carolina in 1753, at the age of nineteen. He was appointed by Governor Dobbs to command the second company which North Carolina had raised for the war, a force of 450 rangers to protect the border counties; and he presently became the most conspicuous military figure in the colony. As to his personality, we have only a few meager details, with a portrait that suggests plainly enough those qualities of boldness and craft which characterized his tactics. Governor Dobbs appears to have had a special love towards Hugh, whose family he had known in Ireland, for an undercurrent of almost fatherly pride is to be found in the old Governor's reports to the a.s.sembly concerning Waddell's exploits.

The terror raged for nearly three years. Cabins and fields were burned, and women and children were slaughtered or dragged away captives. Not only did immigration cease but many hardy settlers fled from the country. At length, after horrors indescribable and great toll of life, the Cherokees gave up the struggle. Their towns were invaded and laid waste by imperial and colonial troops, and they could do nothing but make peace. In 1761 they signed a treaty with the English to hold "while rivers flow and gra.s.ses grow and sun and moon endure."

In the previous year (1760) the imperial war had run its course in America. New France lay prostrate, and the English were supreme not only on the Ohio but on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Louisbourg, Quebec, Montreal, Oswego, Niagara, Duquesne, Detroit-all were in English hands.

Hugh Waddell and his rangers, besides serving with distinction in the Indian war, had taken part in the capture of Fort Duquesne. This feat had been accomplished in 1758 by an expedition under General Forbes. The troops made a terrible march over a new route, cutting a road as they went. It was November when they approached their objective. The wastes of snow and their diminished supplies caused such depression among the men that the officers called a halt to discuss whether or not to proceed toward Fort Duquesne, where they believed the French to be concentrated in force. Extravagant sums in guineas were named as suitable reward for any man who would stalk and catch a French Indian and learn from him the real conditions inside the fort. The honor, if not the guineas, fell to John Rogers, one of Waddell's rangers. From the Indian it was learned that the French had already gone, leaving behind only a few of their number. As the English drew near, they found that the garrison had blown up the magazine, set fire to the fort, and made off.

Thus, while New France was already tottering, but nearly two years before the final capitulation at Montreal, the English again became masters of the Ohio Company's land-masters of the Forks of the Ohio. This time they were there to stay. Where the walls of Fort Duquesne had crumbled in the fire Fort Pitt was to rise, proudly bearing the name of England's Great Commoner who had directed English arms to victory on three continents.

With France expelled and the Indians deprived of their white allies, the westward path lay open to the pioneers, even though the red man himself would rise again and again in vain endeavor to bar the way. So a new era begins, the era of exploration for definite purpose, the era of commonwealth building. In entering on it, we part with the earliest pioneer-the trader, who first opened the road for both the lone home seeker and the great land company. He dwindles now to the mere barterer and so-save for a few chance glimpses-slips out of sight, for his brave days as Imperial Scout are done.

Chapter V. Boone, The Wanderer

What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning from Braddock's disastrous campaign in 1755 we may only conjecture. Perhaps he was planning a career of soldiering, for in later years he was to distinguish himself as a frontier commander in both defense and attack. Or it may be that his heart was full of the wondrous tales told him by the trader, John Findlay, of that Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where buffalo and deer roamed in thousands. Perhaps he meant to set out ere long in search of the great adventure of his dreams, despite the terrible dangers of trail making across the zones of war into the unknown.

However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of these possible plans on his return to the Yadkin but halted for a different adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from his threshold, was offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazards to the daring. He was twenty-two, strong and comely and a whole man; and therefore he was in no mind to refuse what life held out to him in the person of Rebecca Bryan. Rebecca was the daughter of Joseph Bryan, who had come to the Yadkin from Pennsylvania some time before the Boones; and she was in her seventeenth year.

Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours have endeavored to supply, from the saccharine stores of their fancy, the romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which history has omitted to record. Hence the tale that the young hunter, walking abroad in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's large dark eyes s.h.i.+ning in the dusk of the forest, mistook them for a deer's eyes and shot-his aim on this occasion fortunately being bad! But if Boone's rifle was missing its mark at ten paces, Cupid's dart was speeding home. So runs the story concocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorant alike of game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of a man with a maid in a primitive world.

Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. Squire Boone, in his capacity as justice of the peace, tied the knot; and in a small cabin built upon his s.p.a.cious lands the young couple set up housekeeping. Here Daniel's first two sons were born. In the third year of his marriage, when the second child was a babe in arms, Daniel removed with his wife and their young and precious family to Culpeper County in eastern Virginia, for the border was going through its darkest days of the French and Indian War. During the next two or three years we find him in Virginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season; but back on the border with his rifle, after the harvest, aiding in defense against the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his father a lot on Sugar Tree Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (Davie County, North Carolina) and built thereon a cabin for himself. The date when he brought his wife and children to live in their new abode on the border is not recorded. It was probably some time after the close of the Indian War. Of Boone himself during these years we have but scant information. We hear of him again in Virginia and also as a member of the pack-horse caravan which brought into the Back Country the various necessaries for the settlers. We know, too, that in the fall of 1760 he was on a lone hunting trip in the mountains west of the Yadkin; for until a few years ago there might be seen, still standing on the banks of Boone's Creek (a small tributary of the Watauga) in eastern Tennessee, a tree bearing the legend, "D Boon cilled A BAR on this tree 1760." Boone was always fond of carving his exploits on trees, and his wanderings have been traced largely by his arboreal publications. In the next year (1761) he went with Waddell's rangers when they marched with the army to the final subjugation of the Cherokee.

That Boone and his family were back on the border in the new cabin shortly after the end of the war, we gather from the fact that in 1764 he took his little son James, aged seven, on one of his long hunting excursions. From this time dates the intimate comrades.h.i.+p of father and son through all the perils of the wilderness, a comrades.h.i.+p to come to its tragic end ten years later when, as we shall see, the seventeen-year-old lad fell under the red man's tomahawk as his father was leading the first settlers towards Kentucky. In the cold nights of the open camp, as Daniel and James lay under the frosty stars, the father kept the boy warm snuggled to his breast under the broad flap of his hunting s.h.i.+rt. Sometimes the two were away from home for months together, and Daniel declared little James to be as good a woodsman as his father.

Meanwhile fascinating accounts of the new land of Florida, ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, had leaked into the Back Country; and in the winter of 1765 Boone set off southward on horseback with, seven companions. Colonel James Grant, with whose army Boone had fought in 1761, had been appointed Governor of the new colony and was offering generous inducements to settlers. The party traveled along the borders of South Carolina and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater part of their way over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath; and they suffered severe hards.h.i.+ps. Game became scarcer as they proceeded. Once they were nigh to peris.h.i.+ng of starvation and were saved from that fate only through chance meeting with a band of Indians who, seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with them-according to the Indian code in time of peace.

Boone's party explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and Daniel became sufficiently enamored of the tropical south to purchase there land and a house. His wife, however, was unwilling to go to Florida, and she was not long in convincing the hunter that he would soon tire of a gameless country. A gameless country! Perhaps this was the very thought which turned the wanderer's desires again towards the land of Kentucky. * The silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee camps had opened the border forests once more to the nomadic rifleman. Boone was not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His brother-in-law, John Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker and James Ward, in 1766 crossed the Appalachian Mountains, probably by stumbling upon the Indian trail winding from base to summit and from peak to base again over this part of the great hill barrier. They eventually reached the Mississippi River and, having taken a good quant.i.ty of peltry on the way, they launched upon the stream and came in time to New Orleans, where they made a satisfactory trade of their furs.

* Kentucky, from Ken-ta-ke, an Iroquois word meaning "the place of old fields." Adair calls the territory "the old fields." The Indians apparently used the word "old," as we do in a sense of endearment and possession as well as relative to age.

Boone was fired anew by descriptions of this successful feat, in which two of his kinsmen had partic.i.p.ated. He could no longer be held back. He must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into Kentucky-Kentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo and deer were as "ten thousand thousand cattle feeding" in the wilds, and where the balmy air vibrated with the music of innumerable wings.

Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the delectable country in the company of his friend, William Hill, who had been with him in Florida. Autumn was the season of departure on all forest excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been gathered in and the day of the deer had come. By hunting, the explorers must feed themselves on their travels and with deerskins and furs they must on their return recompense those who had supplied their outfit. Boone, the incessant but not always lucky wanderer, was in these years ever in debt for an outfit.

Boone and Hill made their way over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies and crossed the Holston and Clinch rivers. Then they came upon the west fork of the Big Sandy and, believing that it would lead them to the Ohio, they continued for at least a hundred miles to the westward. Here they found a buffalo trace, one of the many beaten out by the herds in their pa.s.sage to the salt springs, and they followed it into what is now Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie land described by Findlay; it was rough and hilly and so overgrown with laurel as to be almost impenetrable. They therefore wended their way back towards the river, doubtless erected the usual hunter's camp of skins or blankets and branches, and spent the winter in hunting and trapping. Spring found them returning to their homes on the Yadkin with a fair winter's haul.

Such urgent desire as Boone's, however, was not to be defeated. The next year brought him his great opportunity. John Findlay came to the Yadkin with a horse pack of needles and linen and peddler's wares to tempt the slim purses of the Back Country folk. The two erstwhile comrades in arms were overjoyed to encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the winter of 1768-69 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay deep outside and good-smelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an expedition into Kentucky through the Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky touch one another, which Findlay felt confident he could find. Findlay had learned of this route from cross-mountain traders in 1753, when he had descended the Ohio to the site of Louisville, whence he had gone with some Shawanoes as a prisoner to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki or Blue Licks. *

* Hanna, "The Wilderness Trail," vol. II, pp. 215-16.

On the first day of May, 1769, Boone and Findlay, accompanied by John Stewart and three other venturesome spirits, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land. Pa.s.sing through the c.u.mberland Gap, they built their first camp in Kentucky on the Red Lick fork of Station Camp Creek.

This camp was their base of operations. From it, usually in couples, we infer, the explorers branched out to hunt and to take their observations of the country. Here also they prepared the deer and buffalo meat for the winter, dried or smoked the geese they shot in superabundance, made the tallow and oil needed to keep their weapons in trim, their leather soft, and their kits waterproof. Their first ill luck befell them in December when Boone and Stewart were captured by a band of Shawanoes who were returning from their autumn hunt on Green River. The Indians compelled the two white men to show them the location of their camp, took possession of all it contained in skins and furs and also helped themselves to the horses. They left the explorers with just enough meat and ammunition to provide for their journey homeward, and told them to depart and not to intrude again on the red men's hunting grounds. Having given this pointed warning, the Shawanoes rode on northward towards their towns beyond the Ohio. On foot, swiftly and craftily, Boone and his brother-in-law trailed the band for two days. They came upon the camp in dead of night, recaptured their horses, and fled. But this was a game in which the Indians themselves excelled, and at this date the Shawanoes had an advantage over Boone in their thorough knowledge of the territory; so that within forty-eight hours the white men were once more prisoners. After they had amused themselves by making Boone caper about with a horse bell on his neck, while they jeered at him in broken English, "Steal horse, eh?" the Shawanoes turned north again, this time taking the two unfortunate hunters with them. Boone and Stewart escaped, one day on the march, by a plunge into the thick tall canebrake. Though the Indians did not attempt to follow them through the mazes of the cane, the situation of the two hunters, without weapons or food, was serious enough. When they found Station Camp deserted and realized that their four companions had given them up for dead or lost and had set off on the trail for home, even such intrepid souls as theirs may have felt fear. They raced on in pursuit and fortunately fell in not only with their party but with Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, and Alexander Neely, who had brought in fresh supplies of rifles, ammunition, flour, and horses.

After this lucky encounter the group separated. Findlay was ill, and Holden, Mooney, and Cooley had had their fill of Kentucky; but Squire, Neely, Stewart, and Daniel were ready for more adventures. Daniel, too, felt under the positive necessity of putting in another year at hunting and trapping in order to discharge his debts and provide for his family. Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp. Here, in idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of "Gulliver's Travels" to entertain the hunters while they dressed their deerskins or tinkered their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the book, though with a p.r.o.nunciation all their own, they christened the nearest creek; and as "Lulbegrud Creek" it is still known.

Before the end of the winter the two Boones were alone in the wilderness. Their brother-in-law, Stewart, had disappeared; and Neely, discouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the Yadkin. In May, Squire Boone fared forth, taking with him the season's catch of beaver, otter, and deerskins to exchange in the North Carolinian trading houses for more supplies; and Daniel was left solitary in Kentucky.

Now followed those lonely explorations which gave Daniel Boone his special fame above all Kentucky's pioneers. He was by no means the first white man to enter Kentucky; and when he did enter, it was as one of a party, under another man's guidance-if we except his former disappointing journey into the laurel thickets of Floyd County. But these others, barring Stewart, who fell there, turned back when they met with loss and hards.h.i.+p and measured the certain risks against the possible gains. Boone, the man of imagination, turned to wild earth as to his kin. His genius lay in the sense of oneness he felt with his wilderness environment. An instinct he had which these other men, as courageous perhaps as he, did not possess.

Never in all the times when he was alone in the woods and had no other man's safety or counsel to consider, did he suffer ill fortune. The nearest approach to trouble that befell him when alone occurred one day during this summer when some Indians emerged from their green shelter and found him, off guard for the moment, standing on a cliff gazing with rapture over the vast rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently cut off from escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing without haste to take him, meanwhile greeting him with mock amity. Over the cliff leaped Boone and into the outspread arms of a friendly maple, whose top bloomed green about sixty feet below the cliff's rim, and left his would-be captors on the height above, grunting their amazement.

During this summer Boone journeyed through the valleys of the Kentucky and the Licking. He followed the buffalo traces to the two Blue Licks and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt earth, a darkly ruddy moving ma.s.s of beasts whose numbers could not be counted. For many miles he wound along the Ohio, as far as the Falls. He also found the Big Bone Lick with its mammoth fossils.

In July, 1770, Daniel returned to the Red River camp and there met Squire Boone with another pack of supplies. The two brothers continued their hunting and exploration together for some months, chiefly in Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's name. In that winter they even braved the Green River ground, whence had come the hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's first fruits a year before. In the same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin another party of hunters, called, from their lengthy sojourn in the twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker, afterwards related how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself stole silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the strange noises came, and descried Daniel Boone p.r.o.ne on his back with a deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat beside him and his mouth opened wide in joyous but apparently none too tuneful song. This incident gives a true character touch. It is not recorded of any of the men who turned back that they sang alone in the wilderness.

In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear Daniel of debt and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years. But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gates-for in the c.u.mberland Gap they were suddenly surrounded by Indians who took everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.