Some twenty-five years after his death, the legislature of Kentucky awakened to a sense of the greatness of this man, and to the onerous nature of that debt of gratitude under which he had placed his commonwealth. By virtue of a special enactment, the bodies of Boone and his faithful wife were moved from their Missouri home, eastward across the Mississippi River, and laid at rest in the cemetery of Frankfort, close to that original stockade where, supported by an “unwavering fortitude”, there first flew the hard beset flag of the west-bound. These coffins came garlanded with flowers, heralded with music, surrounded with tardy honors. They were laid away on September thirteenth, 1845. There were effusive speeches in abundance, the chief oration being pronounced by Mr. Crittenden, “the leading orator of his time,” as he is called in the chronicle. Thus at last this primeval patriarch, this Father of the Frontier, this leader of the Western home-builders, came home to sleep on the soil that was by right his own.
| [8] | There was long known a tree near the Cumberland which bore this quaint inscription: “D. Boon Cilled A Bar on this tree, year 1760.” |
| [9] | There is continual discrepancy among the historians regarding these incidents. Thus another writer states that Boone and Stewart were twice taken prisoners by the savages, but that no northward journey was made by the Indians, who simply kept the prisoners at their camps, and at length dismissed them with a warning to leave Kentucky, as it was their own hunting ground and belonged to the Indians only. Again there seems confusion in the stories of the death of Neeley and Stewart. One account is that Boone saw Stewart shot down and scalped; another states that Stewart disappeared, and that no idea of his fate was obtained until years afterward, when in a hollow tree Boone found a skeleton, near which was Stewart’s powder horn, which had his name inscribed upon it. |
CHAPTER IX
A FRONTIER REPUBLIC
If we have been successful in the first of our undertakings, that of investigating the first stage of the American transcontinental pilgrimage, which brought the Anglo-Saxon civilization permanently into the Mississippi valley, we must have gained in our earlier chapters some knowledge of the characteristics of the west-bound men, and of the motives that actuated them.
We shall also have noticed the beginning of a new type of man,—a man born of new problems, new necessities. Obliged to think and act for himself, it was natural that this man should learn to be restive when others thought for him. It was not to be expected that the men of New England and New York should understand this new man. We do not understand the Asiatics to-day; and at the time Daniel Boone reached the Mississippi it was farther from the Mississippi to New York than it is from New York to the Philippines to-day.
The American pilgrimage, whether at times painful, halting, broken, or at other times rapid, feverish, insane, has at the one time or the other been no better than the transportation at hand. The long, hard roads, the slow travel of those early trans-Appalachian days were at the bottom of the greatest national problem of those days.
The men of the East could not believe that loyalty might be expected of the men of the West; and the latter, feeling the force of their geographical position, and feeling also their own ability to take care of themselves, openly talked of all manner of schisms, sectionalisms and governmental speculations. The West talked secession almost before it was a West. Under the conditions of those days it was small crime that it did so; the fact proved no disloyalty of the old type, but the strength and vigor of the new type of American that had now been born, which declared itself able to hold and govern its own new-found world.