Daniel Boone

by Reuben Gold Thwaites

The reader of this narrative has, of course, already discovered that Daniel Boone was neither the original white explorer of Kentucky nor the first white hunter within its limits. Many others had been there before him. It will be worth our while at this point to take a hasty review of some of the previous expeditions which had made the "dark and bloody ground" known to the world.

Probably none of the several Spanish explorations of the sixteenth century along the Mississippi River and through the Gulf States had touched Kentucky. But during the seventeenth century both the French in Canada and the English on the Atlantic tidewater came to have fairly accurate notions of the country lying immediately to the south of the Ohio River. As early as 1650 Governor Berkeley, of Virginia, made a vain attempt to cross the Alleghany barrier in search of the Mississippi, concerning which he had heard from Indians; and we know that at the same time the French, especially the Jesuit missionaries, were looking eagerly in that direction. A few years later Colonel Abraham Wood, of Virginia, discovered streams which poured into the Ohio and the Mississippi. Just a century before Boone's great hunt, John Lederer, also of Virginia, explored for a considerable distance beyond the mountains. The following year Thomas Batts and his party proclaimed King Charles II upon New River, the upper waters of the Great Kanawha—twelve months before La Salle took possession of all Western waters for the French king, and nineteen before Marquette and Joliet discovered the Mississippi.

There is a tradition that in 1678, only five years after the voyage of Marquette and Joliet, a party of New Englanders ventured into the Western wilderness as far as New Mexico. The later French expeditions of La Salle, Hennepin, and D'Iberville are well known. Several Englishmen traded with Indians upon the Mississippi before the close of the seventeenth century; by 1719 the English were so numerous that Governor Keith, of Pennsylvania, suggested that four forts be built for their protection in the Wabash and Illinois countries. We hear of a French expedition investigating Big Bone Lick, in Kentucky, in 1735; and other visits were successively made by bands of their compatriots until the downfall of New France, over a quarter of a century later. In 1742 John Howard and Peter Salling, of Virginia, were exploring in Kentucky; six years after them Dr. Thomas Walker made a notable expedition through the same country; and two years after that Washington's backwoods friend, Christopher Gist, was on the site of Louisville selecting lands for the Ohio Company, which had a large grant upon the Ohio River.

Henceforward, border chronicles abound with reports of the adventures of English fur-traders, hunters, and land-viewers, all along the Ohio River and tributary waters above Louisville. Among these early adventurers was our friend Finley, whose experiences in Kentucky dated from 1752, and who piloted Boone to the promised land through the gateway of Cumberland Gap. The subsequent Indian wars, with the expeditions into the upper Ohio Valley by Generals Braddock, Forbes, and Bouquet, made the country still better known; and settlers were soon rushing in by scores, although as yet none of them appear to have made clearings within Kentucky itself.

Officers and soldiers who had served in the French and Indian War were given liberal grants of land in the West. Washington had not only his own grant, as the principal officer upon the southwest frontier, but was agent for a number of fellow-soldiers, and in 1767 went to the Ohio River to select and survey claims. At the very time when Boone was engaged upon his fruitless expedition down the Big Sandy, Washington was making the first surveys in Kentucky on both the Little and Big Sandy. Again, in 1770, when Boone was exploring the Kentucky wilderness, Washington was surveying extensive tracts along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha, and planning for a large colony upon his own lands. The outbreak of the Revolution caused the great man to turn his attention from the over-mountain region to the defense of his country. Had he been left to carry out his plans, he would doubtless have won fame as the most energetic of Western pioneers.

It will be remembered that when Boone and his companions passed through Cumberland Gap in the early summer of 1769, they found the well-worn trail of other hunters who had preceded them from the settlements. The men of the Yadkin Valley were not the only persons seeking game in Kentucky that year. At about the time when Boone was bidding farewell to his family, Hancock and Richard Taylor, Abraham Hempinstall, and one Barbour, frontiersmen of the same type, started from their homes in Orange County, Va., to explore the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. They descended from Pittsburg in a boat, explored Kentucky, and proceeded into Arkansas, where they camped and hunted during the following winter. The next year two of them traveled eastward to Florida, and thence northwardly to their homes; the others stayed in Arkansas for another year, and returned by sea from New Orleans to New York.

Simultaneously with the expeditions of Boone and the Taylors, a party of twenty or more adventurous hunters and explorers was formed in the New River region, in the Valley of Virginia. They set out in June (1769), piloted by Uriah Stone, who had been in Kentucky three years before. Entering by way of the now familiar Cumberland Gap, these men had experiences quite similar to those of Boone and his comrades. At some of the Kentucky salt-licks they found herds of buffaloes numbering up in the thousands—at one lick a hundred acres were densely massed with these bulky animals, who exhibited no fear until the wind blew from the hunters toward them, and then they would "dash wildly away in large droves and disappear." Like Boone's party, they also were the victims of Cherokees, who plundered their camps, and after leaving them some guns and a little ammunition, ordered them out of the country. The New River party being large, however, some of their number were deputed to go to the settlements and bring back fresh supplies, so that they could finish their hunt. After further adventures with Indians half of the hunters returned home; while the others wandered into Tennessee and as far as the Ozark Mountains, finally reaching New River through Georgia and the Carolinas. Another Virginian, named John McCulloch, who courted the perils of exploration, was in Kentucky in the summer of 1769 with a white man-servant and a negro. He visited the site of Terre Haute, Ind., and went by canoe to Natchez and New Orleans, and at length reached Philadelphia by sea.

But the most famous of all the expeditions of the period was that of the "Long Hunters," as they have come to be known in Western history. Inspired by the favorable reports of Stone and others, about forty of the most noted and successful hunters of New River and Holston Valleys formed, in the summer of 1770, a company for hunting and trapping to the west of Cumberland Mountains. Under the leadership of two of the best woodsmen of the region, Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs, and including several of Stone's party, they set out in early autumn fully prepared for meeting Indians and living on game. Each man took with him three packhorses, rifles, ammunition, traps, dogs, blankets, and salt, and was dressed in the deerskin costume of the times.

Pushing on through Cumberland Gap, the adventurers were soon in the heart of Kentucky. In accordance with custom, they visited some of the best licks—a few of which were probably first seen by them—for here wild beasts were always to be found in profusion. At Knob Licks they beheld from an eminence which overlooked the springs "what they estimated at largely over a thousand animals, including buffaloe, elk, bear, and deer, with many wild turkies scattered among them—all quite restless, some playing, and others busily employed in licking the earth; but at length they took flight and bounded away all in one direction, so that in the brief space of a couple of minutes not an animal was to be seen." Within an area of many acres, the animals had eaten the salty earth to a depth of several feet.

Successful in a high degree, the party ceased operations in February, and had completed preparations for sending a large shipment of skins, furs, and "jerk" to the settlements, when, in their temporary absence, roving Cherokees robbed them of much of their stores and spoiled the greater part of the remainder. "Fifteen hundred skins gone to ruination!" was the legend which one of them carved upon the bark of a neighboring tree, a record to which were appended the initials of each member of the party. A series of disasters followed, in the course of which two men were carried off by Indians and never again seen, and others fled for home. Those remaining, having still much ammunition and the horses, continued their hunt, chiefly upon the Green and Cumberland Rivers, and in due time brought together another store of peltries, almost as extensive as that despoiled by the savages.