BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD
By Arthur Butler Hulbert
Our highways are usually known by two names—the destinations to which they lead. The famous highway through New York State is known as the Genesee Road in the eastern half of the State and as the Albany Road in the western portion. In a number of cities through which it passes—Utica, Syracuse, etc.,—it is Genesee Street. This path in the olden time was the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old Forbes Road across Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name.... Few roads named from their builders preserved the old-time name.
One roadway—the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in America—holds the old-time name with undiminished loyalty and is true to-day to every gloomy description and wild epithet that was ever written or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man's use by Daniel Boone from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River, Tennessee, to the mouth of Otter Creek, on the Kentucky River, in the month preceding the outbreak of open revolution at Lexington and Concord. It was known as "Boone's Trail," the "Kentucky Road," the "road to Caintuck" or the "Virginia Road," but its common name was the "Wilderness Road." It seems right that the brave frontiersman who opened this road to white men should be remembered by this act.
The road itself is of little consequence—it is what the early founding of the commonwealth of Kentucky meant to the East and to the West. When the armies of the Revolutionary War are counted, that first army of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children which hurried over Boone's little path, through dark Powel's Valley, over the "high-swung gateway" of Cumberland Gap and down through the laurel wilderness to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington, and Louisville, must not be forgotten. No army ever meant more to the West.
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It was, throughout the eighteenth century, exceedingly dangerous to travel Boone's Road; and those who journeyed either way joined together and traveled in "companies." Indeed, there was risk enough for the most daring, in any case; but a well-armed "company" of tried pioneers on Boone's Road was a dangerous game on which to prey. It was customary to advertise the departure of a company either from Virginia or Kentucky, in local papers, in order that any desiring to make the journey might know of the intended departure. The principal rendezvous in Kentucky was the frontier settlement of Crab Orchard. Certain of these advertisements are extremely interesting; the verbal changes are significant if closely read: