They call Daniel Boone explorer, hunter, Indian fighter. Let us figure him as philosopher. Temperament and training gave footing for that part of his philosophy that embodied his permanent personal conviction that “God had appointed him as an instrument for the settlement of the wilderness.”
Boone, after his marriage, and after his edging out westward toward the head of the Yadkin, lived much as he had done before. His cabin was no better than his neighbor’s, his little corn farm was much as theirs, albeit his table always had wild meat enough and to spare, and there were hides and furs in abundance. By this time two generations of white men had held this slope of the Appalachians. The buffalo had in all likelihood crossed the mountains to the westward, though one writer says they were “abundant” on the Yadkin at this time. Boone may perhaps have seen an elk now and then along the Yadkin, but even this is not certain. Bear, deer, turkey, small furred animals, he took in numbers. He was content, nor did he differ much from his fellows. He must have been about thirty years of age before he began to evince traits distinctly different from those of his scattered wilderness neighbors; before he began to hear the Voices, whispering yet irresistible, that called him on; those Voices of the West, which for a hundred years called our best and boldest to come out into the unknown and the alluring; those Voices which to-day are perforce stilled forever.
It was in the year 1769, in the month of May, that Boone started out for his first determined exploration of “the far-famed but little-known land of Kentucky.” He had before this time been eager to cross the range and see for himself; indeed, he had made one short hunting trip into what is now the eastern edge of the state of Kentucky. Now, in the prime of life, at thirty-five years of age, he felt that the time had come for him to cross the range and make his abiding place in the West.
We are accustomed to think that Boone was the first explorer of Kentucky, but such was by no means the case. Boone’s first trip across the mountains, to the headwaters of the Holston, was in 1761. John Peter Salling, a West Virginian, crossed Kentucky and Illinois as early as 1738. Doctor Thomas Walker and a party of Virginians had long before deliberately explored a part of Kentucky; and in 1751 Boone’s Yadkin neighbor, Christopher Gist,—the same Gist that accompanied Washington in his dangerous winter trip to the French forts on the Ohio,—made yet fuller explorations.
Some of these early voyagings were not made of intent. Salling crossed Kentucky as a captive of the Indians, who took him as far west as Kaskaskia; and Mary Draper Ingles, “the first American bride west of the mountains,” whose father established the first actual settlement west of the Alleghanies, was in 1755 taken captive by the savages, and carried across Kentucky and parts of Ohio and Indiana, thus being an explorer quite against her will.
Two hunters from Pittsburg, James Harrod and Michael Steiner or Stoner, after pushing out into the Illinois country, crossed the Ohio and traveled quite across Kentucky, as far south as the present city of Nashville, Tennessee. Steiner and Harrod were friends of Boone’s, and Harrod built his stockade of Harrodsburg a year before Boonesborough was begun, his journey with Steiner having been made two years before Boone made his pilgrimage across the Divide.
Kasper Mansker or Mansco, later a famous scout and Indian fighter, went with the Virginian “Long Hunters” into Kentucky in 1769. John Finley or Finlay had traded with the Indians on the Red River of Kentucky in 1752, some years before Boone saw that region. Finley was an associate of Boone’s in the border wars before Boone was married, and it was Finley, in all likelihood, that first set Boone aflame with the desire to see and settle in Kentucky. Yet he might have had the counsel of James McBride, who in 1754 visited the mouth of the Kentucky River, and came back to say that he “had found the best tract of land in North America, and probably in the world.” Finley added to these stories, and clinched it all by saying that game of all kinds was abundant, that the mountains were beautiful beyond description, and that, moreover, salt could be manufactured on the spot.
This last argument had very much to do with the settlement of Kentucky. Salt and lead were essentials. Salt was very heavy. The transportation across these grim mountains was very difficult. If one could have salt in Kentucky, it would not be necessary for one to come back. To-day we can scarcely understand this reasoning, once so cogent.
To strengthen the grasp upon historical facts and dates it is sometimes well to begin at the time close at hand, and go backward. We may therefore make a reversed recapitulation of the explorations of Kentucky, this dark and bloody hunting and fighting ground of many tribes of strong-legged and peppery-headed savages.
In 1770 the “Long Hunters” of Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs were in Kentucky—indeed, ran across Daniel Boone there; yet Kentucky was then an oldish land. In 1766 James Smith and five others explored much of west Tennessee, and worked north as far as Illinois. The Virginian, John McCullough, with one white companion, saw Kentucky in the summer of 1769, pushed on northward as far as the point where Terre Haute, Indiana, now stands, and later descended the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Uriah Stone took a party of twenty hunters over the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in the month of June, 1769, one month later than Boone’s journey thither; but Stone had been in Kentucky in 1766.