American Men of Action

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

The French, in their eagerness for empire, allied themselves with the Indians, supplied them with arms, and offered a bounty for scalps; and for nearly three quarters of a century, a bitter and bloody contest was waged, which ended only with the expulsion of the French from the continent. Deprived of their ally, the Indians retreated beyond the mountains, where their war parties gathered to drive back the white invader. Those years on the frontier developed a race of men accustomed to danger and ready for any chance; and towering head and shoulders above them all stands the mighty figure of Daniel Boone, the most famous of American pioneers. About him cluster legends and tales innumerable, some true, many false; but one thing is certain; for boldness, cunning and knowledge of woodcraft and Indian warfare he had no equal.

Born in Pennsylvania, but moving at an early age to the little frontier settlement of Holman's Ford, in North Carolina, the boy had barely enough schooling to enable him to read and write. His real books were the woods, and he studied them until they held no secrets from him. He was a born hunter, a lover of the wild life of the forest, impatient of civilization, and truly at home only in the wilderness. The cry of the panther, the war-whoop of the Indian, were music to him; that was his nature—to love adventure, to court danger, to welcome the thrill of the pulse which peril brings. Understand him: he was not the man to incur foolish risks; but he incurred necessary ones without a second thought. He was near death no doubt a hundred times, yet lived to die in his bed. But he was at his best, he really lived, only when the wilderness held him and when his life depended upon his care and watchfulness.

Boone

In 1755, Boone married and built a log cabin far up the Yadkin, where he had no neighbors; but as the years passed, other families settled near; the smoke of other cabins rose above the woods; his fields were bounded by rude fences; he could scarcely stir out without encountering some neighbor. It was too crowded for Daniel Boone; he felt the same sensation that your nature lover feels to-day in the midst of a teeming city—a sense of suffocation and disgust—and he finally determined to move still further westward, and to cross the mountains into Kentucky, concerning whose richness many stories had reached his ears. He persuaded six men to accompany him, and on the first day of May, 1769, set forth on the perilous journey which was to mark the beginning of his life-work.

Up to that time, the Alleghany Mountains had marked a boundary beyond which white settlers dared not go, for to the west lay great reaches of forest, uninhabited except for wild beasts and still wilder bands of roving Indians. Into this forest, Boone and his companions plunged, and after some weeks of wandering, emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky—a country not owned by any Indian tribe, but visited only by wandering war- and hunting-parties from the nations living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee. The party found game in abundance, especially great droves of buffalo, and spent some months in hunting and exploring. A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions, and forthwith killed him; a second soon met the same fate, and Boone himself had more than one narrow escape. The danger grew so great, that the other members of the party returned over the mountains, and Boone was, for a time, left alone, as he himself put it, "without company of any fellow-creature, or even a horse or dog."

His brother joined him after a time, and the two spent the winter together. Game furnished abundant food, and the only danger was from the Indians, but that was an ever-present one. Sometimes they slept in hollow trees, at other times, they changed their resting-place every night, and after making a fire, would go off for a mile or two in the woods to sleep. Unceasing vigilance was the price of safety. When spring came, Boone's brother returned over the mountains, and again he was left alone. Three months later the brother came back, bringing a party of hunters, but no one was inclined to settle in so dangerous a locality, the struggle to possess which was so fierce that it became known as "the dark and bloody ground."

In 1773, Boone himself started to lead a band of settlers over the mountains, but while passing through the frowning defiles of the Cumberland Gap, they were attacked by Indians and driven back, two of Boone's sons being among the slain. Hunting parties crossed the mountains from time to time after that, and made great inroads on the vast herds of game, but the Indians were in arms everywhere, and not until they had been defeated at the battle of Point Pleasant, the bloodiest in the history of Virginia with its Indian foe, did they sue for peace.

The coming of peace marked a new era in the development of the western country. Some years before, a company of men headed by Richard Henderson, had conceived the grandiose project of founding in the west a great colony, and had purchased from the Cherokee Indians a vast tract of land, which they named Transylvania. It included all the land between the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers, and Daniel Boone was selected to blaze a way into the wilderness, to mark out a road, and start the first settlement. He got a party together, crossed the mountains, and on April 1, 1775, began to build a fort on the left bank of the Kentucky river, calling it Fort Boone, afterwards Boonesborough. Some settlers moved in, but the outbreak of the Revolution and the consequent renewal of Indian hostilities under encouragement from the British put a stop to immigration.