The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

by Emerson Hough

He seems to have been happy, alone in a solitude whose nature one can not understand who has never found himself under conditions at least mildly similar. His consolation came in his communings with the wild things about him, in his readings in the great book of nature. His gallery was the magnificent one of wood and stream and hill. “He stood upon an eminence, whence, looking about in astonishment, he beheld the ample plain and beauteous upland, and saw the river rolling in silent dignity. The chirp of the birds solaced his cares with music. The numerous deer and elk which passed him gave him assurance that he was in the midst of plenty. Cheerfulness possessed his mind. He was a second Adam—if the figure be not too strong—giving names to springs and rivers and places all unknown to civilized man.” Such was the kingdom of the West.

Now came again the faithful Squire Boone, all the way from the far-off Yadkin. These two discovered country of such fertility and such abundance in game that they no longer had any heart left for the more barren region of North Carolina. They determined to bring thither their families, and the fall of that year saw them both back at the old home, making plans for the pilgrimage into the new world beyond the Alleghanies. Restless and ill-content we may suppose Daniel to have been, for it was not until the fall of 1773 that he was able to sell his farm and get together his effects.

Five families left the Yadkin with him for Kentucky, these being joined later by forty men, all of whom traveled under the guidance of Boone. They proceeded westward in pastoral cavalcade, driving their herds and carrying their effects with them. So far, very well, until the tenth of October, when came the first ambuscade of the savage Indians. Six men of the party were killed, among these a son of Daniel Boone. The cattle were scattered or destroyed. No wonder that all lost heart except the steadfast leader. He was content to remain with the retreating party in the settlements of the Clinch River only until June of the following year.

Now, biding his time, and longing for greater adventures, Boone receives a message from the governor of Virginia. It seems there are certain surveyors who have gone down the Ohio River and have lost themselves in the wilderness. Could Daniel Boone discover these surveyors for the governor? Assuredly. And hence he undertakes his first real mission of independent leadership. He has but one companion, Michael Stoner or Steiner, and before them lie many hundred miles of trackless forest, with no road, no path, no trail. Yet the surveyors are found and led safely back to their own.

This act seems to inspire confidence in Boone, and Colonel Henderson, a famous land speculator, employs him as his agent for the purchase from the Southern Indians of certain lands lying south of the Kentucky River. Boone is successful in these negotiations. It is necessary now that there should be a road established between these outlying lands and the door of civilization. Who better than Boone to establish this wilderness trail? He lays out the way from the Holston to the Kentucky River. We are told, without unnecessary flourish, that “in this work four of his party were killed and five wounded.”

It was in April, 1775, that Boone erected a station or palisade on the Kentucky River near a salt lick. We are told that the stockade was built “sixty yards from the south bank of the stream.” This was close to the present site of the town of Frankfort, Kentucky. Another writer says the date of the foundation of Boonesborough—as the station was called—was June fourteenth, 1775. Dates are unimportant. The fact is that Boone during that spring attained his immediate and most cherished ambition. He established his home in the heart of this beautiful land of Kentucky.

Thither he moved his family, his wife and daughter being the first white women willingly and of intent to set foot on the soil of Kentucky. Boone was now in the heyday of life, strong, fearless, tireless, a keen hunter, a cool-headed warrior. The ways of the wilderness were known to him. The imprint on the moss, the discolored water at the fountain, the broken bough, the abraded bark on the tree-trunk—all these things were an open book. No Indian could imitate the chatter of the squirrel, the calling of the crow, the gobbling of the wild turkey in his signals to his fellow savage, so closely that the acute ear of this master hunter did not detect the deceit. If savages crossed the country within a score of miles of his station, Boone knew of them, knew how they were armed, knew what was their purpose in that land. None could have been better equipped than he as “an instrument for the settlement of the wilderness.”

Life went on in Kentucky much as on the Yadkin, on the Clinch or on the Holston. White men began to gather in at the station of Boonesborough, or at one of the two or three other posts that now were established in the land. These white men, shoulder to shoulder, fought the savages cheerfully, continuously, never for a moment thinking of surrendering their hold. The leader of this wild warfare was Daniel Boone, the man of “unwavering fortitude.”

The war of the rebellion against the Old World was now going on apace. Great Britain had given the red savages below the Great Lakes better arms and had deliberately incited a more insatiate enmity against the white man. Whereas the Indians had at first adopted prisoners into their tribe, they now became more savage and implacable, in many more instances killing such prisoners as fell into their hands.

Here we find ourselves again to some extent in the realms of imagination as to the adventures of Daniel Boone. We meet the ancient anecdote of the capture by the Indians of Boone’s daughter, in company with two daughters of the neighboring Calloway family. Some say that the children were out hunting up the cows, others that they were in a canoe on the river, and that the canoe was taken away by a savage who swam out and made them prisoners. We may be sure that Boone and Calloway raised a party in pursuit, and it may be deemed historical fact that they rescued their daughters; though some state that the rescue was effected within a few miles of the post, whereas others place it after a long journey, and state that Boone and Calloway were themselves taken prisoners by the savages, and in turn rescued by their surviving companions only after a bitter struggle. One may suit himself in these matters, yet he must believe that the settlement of Boonesborough was the center of a most savage and relentless warfare.