School Reading By Grades: Fifth Year

by James Baldwin

Near the end of 1770, his faithful brother came back to meet him at the old camp. Shortly after they proceeded together to the Cumberland River, giving names to the different waters; and he then returned to his wife and children, fixed in his purpose, at the risk of life and fortune, to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucky, which he esteemed a second Paradise.

II

In March, 1775, Daniel Boone, with a body of enterprising companions, proceeded to mark out a path up Powell’s valley, and through the mountains and canebrakes beyond. On the twenty-fifth of the month they were waylaid by Indians, who killed two men and wounded another very severely. Two days later the savages killed and scalped two more. “Now,” wrote Daniel Boone, “is the time to keep the country while we are in it. If we give way now, it will ever be the case,” and he pressed forward to the Kentucky River. There, on the first day of April, at the distance of about sixty yards from its west bank, near the mouth of Otter Creek, he began a stockade fort, which took the name of Boonesboro.

At that place, while the congress at Philadelphia was groping irresolutely in the dark, seventeen men assembled as representatives of the four “towns” that then formed the seed of the state. Among these children of nature was Daniel Boone, the pioneer of the party. His colleague, Richard Calloway, was one of the founders of Kentucky, and one of its early martyrs. The town of St. Asaph sent John Floyd, a surveyor, who emigrated from southwestern Virginia; an able writer, respected for his culture and dignity of manner; of innate good breeding; ready to defend the weak; heedless of his own life if he could recover women and children who had been made captive by the savages; destined to do good service, and survive the dangers of western life till American independence should be fought for and won.

From the settlement at Boiling Spring came James Harrod, the same who, in 1774, had led a party of forty-one to Harrodsburg, and during the summer of that year had built the first log-cabin in Kentucky; a tall, erect, and resolute backwoodsman; unlettered but not ignorant; intrepid yet gentle; never weary of kind offices to those around him; a skillful hunter, for whom the rifle had a companionship, and the wilderness a charm.

These and their associates, the fathers of Kentucky, seventeen in all, met on the 23d of May, beneath the great elm tree of Boonesboro, outside of the fort, on the thick sward of the fragrant white clover. The convention having been organized, prayers were read by a minister of the Church of England. A speech was then delivered to the convention in behalf of the proprietary purchases of the land from the Cherokees. To it a committee, of which Calloway was the head, made reply. “Deeply impressed,” they said, “with a sense of the importance of the trust our constituents have reposed in us, we will attempt the task with vigor, not doubting but unanimity will insure us success. That we have a right, as a political body, without giving umbrage to Great Britain, or any of the colonies, to frame rules for the government of our little society, cannot be doubted by any sensible or unbiased mind.”

So reasoned the fathers of Kentucky. In their legislation, it was their chief care to copy after the happy pattern of the English laws. Their colony they called Transylvania. For defense against the savages, they organized a militia; they discountenanced profane swearing and Sabbath breaking; they took thought for preventing the waste of game, and improving the breed of horses; and by solemn agreement they established as the basis of their constitution the annual choice of delegates; taxes to be raised by the convention alone; perfect religious freedom and general toleration.

Thus a little band of hunters put themselves at the head of the countless hosts of civilization in establishing the great principle of intellectual freedom. Long as the shadows of the western mountain shall move round with the sun, long as the rivers that gush from those mountains shall flow toward the sea, long as seedtime and harvest shall return, that rule shall remain the law of the West.

The state of Kentucky honors the memory of the plain, simple hearted man, who is best known as its pioneer. He was kindly in his nature, and never wronged a human being, not even an Indian, nor, indeed, animal life of any kind. “I with others have fought Indians,” he would say; “but I do not know that I ever killed one. If I did, it was in battle, and I never knew it.” In woodcraft he was acknowledged to be the first among men. This led him to love solitude, and to hover on the frontier, with no abiding place, accompanied by the wife of his youth, who was the companion of his long life and travel. When, at last, death put them both to rest, Kentucky reclaimed their bones from their graves far up the Missouri; and now they lie buried on the hill above the cliffs of the Kentucky River, overlooking the lovely valley of the capital of that commonwealth. Around them are emblems of wilderness life; the turf of the blue grass lies lightly above them; and they are laid with their faces turned upward and westward, and their feet toward the setting sun.

Such is the account which George Bancroft, the first of American historians, gives of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky, and of the founding of the commonwealth of which Boone was the earliest and most distinguished promoter. Few other works have contributed so much to the dignity and distinction of our literature as has Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” from which this extract has been taken.