CHAPTER VI

BOONE AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN'S-LAND

TH

1769-1774

HE American backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent beyond. The people threatened by them were dimly conscious of the danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. Far off, among their quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power that was to overwhelm their children and successors; but nearer by, Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algonquin and Appalachian, were all uneasy as they began to feel the first faint pressure of the American advance.

As yet they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like an unrent mantle. All through the mountains, and far beyond, it stretched without a break; but toward the mouth of the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of long grass. This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the

debatable ground between the Northern and the Southern Indians. Neither dared dwell therein,1 but both used it as their hunting-grounds; and it was traversed from end to end by the well marked war traces2 which they followed when they invaded each other's territory. The whites, on trying to break through the barrier which hemmed them in from the western lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing along the line of least resistance; and so their first great advance was made in this debatable land, where the uncertainly defined huntinggrounds of the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon those of Northern Algonquin and Wyandot.

Unknown and unnamed hunters and Indian traders had from time to time pushed some little way into the wilderness; and they had been followed by others of whom we do indeed know the names, but little more. One explorer had found and named the Cumberland river and mountains, and the great pass called Cumberland Gap.3 Others had gone far

This is true as a whole; but along the Mississippi, in the extreme west of the present Kentucky and Tennessee, the Chickasaws held possession. There was a Shawnee town south of the Ohio, and Cherokee villages in southeastern Tennessee.

2 The backwoodsmen generally used "trace," where Western frontiersmen would now say “trail?”

3 Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia. He named them after the Duke of Cumberland. Walker was a genuine explorer and surveyor, a man of mark as a pioneer. The journal of his trip across the Cumberland to the headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750 has been preserved, and has just been published by William Cabell Rives (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.). It

beyond the utmost limits this man had reached, and had hunted in the great bend of the Cumberland and in the woodland region of Kentucky, famed among the Indians for the abundance of the game.1 is very interesting, and Mr. Rives has done a real service in publishing it. Walker and five companions were absent six months. He found traces of earlier wanderers-probably hunters. One of his companions was bitten by a bear; three of the dogs were wounded by bears, and one killed by an elk; the horses were frequently bitten by rattlesnakes; once a bull-buffalo threatened the whole party. They killed 13 buffaloes, 8 elks, 53 bears, 20 deer, 150 turkeys, and some other game.

4 Hunters and Indian traders visited portions of Kentucky and Tennessee years before the country became generally known even on the border. (Not to speak of the French, who had long known something of the country, where they had even made trading posts and built furnaces, as see Haywood, etc.). We know the names of a few. Those who went down the Ohio, merely landing on the Kentucky shore, do not deserve mention; the French had done as much for a century. Whites who had been captured by the Indians, were sometimes taken through Tennessee or Kentucky, as John Salling in 1730, and Mrs. Mary Inglis in 1756 (see “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” Collins, etc.). In 1654 a certain Colonel Wood was in Kentucky. The next real explorer was nearly a century later, though Doherty in 1690, and Adair in 1730, traded with the Cherokees in what is now Tennessee. Walker struck the headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750; he had been to the Cumberland in 1748. He made other exploring trips. Christopher Gist went up the Kentucky in 1751. In 1756 and 1758 Forts Loudon and Chissel were built on the Tennessee headwaters, but were soon afterward destroyed by the Cherokees. In 1761, '62, '63, and for a year or two afterward, a party of hunters under the lead of one Wallen, hunted on the western waters, going continually further west. In 1765 Croghan made a sketch of the Ohio River. In 1766 James Smith and others explored Tennessee. Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay, and a party from

But their accounts excited no more than a passing interest; they came and went without comment, as lonely stragglers had come and gone for nearly a century. The backwoods civilization crept slowly westward without being influenced in its movements by their explorations.5

Finally, however, among these hunters one arose whose wanderings were to bear fruit; who was destined to lead through the wilderness the first body of settlers that ever established a community in the far West, completely cut off from the seaboard colonies. This was Daniel Boone. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1734,6 but when only a boy had been brought with the rest of his family to the banks of the Yadkin in North Carolina. Here he grew up, South Carolina were near the present site of Nashville in 1767; in the same year John Finley and others were in Kentucky; and it was Finley who first told Boone about it and led him thither.

The attempt to find out the names of the men who first saw the different portions of the western country is not very profitable. The first visitors were hunters, simply wandering in search of game, not with any settled purpose of exploration. Who the individual first-comers were, has generally been forgotten. At the most it is only possible to find out the name of some one of several who went to a given locality. The hunters were wandering everywhere. By chance some went to places we now consider important. By chance the names of a few of these have been preserved. But the credit belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to the individual backwoodsman.

6 August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boone). His grandfather was an English immigrant; his father had married a Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country was still a wilderness. He was born in Berks Co.

and as soon as he came of age he married, built a log hut, and made a clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of his backwoods neighbors. They all tilled their own clearings, guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as a matter of course, hunters. With Boone hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind; and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His selfcommand and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond.

Boone hunted on the Western waters at an early date. In the valley of Boone's Creek, a tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech tree still standing, on which can be faintly traced an inscription setting