Boone: A Biography (11 page)

It is easy to see why sugar making attracted Daniel. He did not much care for farming. Maple syrup was not something that had to be cultivated in the fields, in long days in the hot sun plowing and hoeing and weeding. Maples grew in the forest, like the game, and could be tapped in the cool days of late winter as the sap rose from the deep root systems. Once the trees were tapped and the sap wept into buckets was carried to the boiling furnace, the main work was keeping the fire going. It takes forty gallons of sap to boil down to one gallon of syrup, and ten gallons of syrup to boil down to eight pounds of sugar. But the product was unsurpassed sweetening to use in cooking, sell, or give to friends. Maple sugar was the sweetening the Indians had before the whites arrived. Once made, the syrup could be fermented as a kind of mead or distilled into spirits. The boiling was done in late winter as snow was disappearing, just as arbutus was beginning to bloom. Sugaring came at the end of the trapping season, as the fur was getting thinner, less valuable, before the deer hides were in their prime spring and summer condition. Sugaring was the first sign that spring
was on the way, a ritual to welcome the new season. Sugar making gave Daniel and Rebecca an opportunity to work together, a chance they rarely missed.

The house Daniel built on Sugartree Creek, when he was about twenty-two years old, was more substantial than a simple cabin. The logs were hewed flat and fit snugly together. A big fireplace and chimney of soapstone and wood provided heat for cooking and living, and much of the light in the evenings. There was an outside kitchen for cooking in summer, and Daniel later added a puncheon floor fixed with wooden pegs. The house measured eighteen by twenty-four feet and, according to a resident in the area at the time, was still standing a century later.

Settlers on the frontier were accustomed to living in small spaces. There could be little privacy with children of all ages, babies crying, someone breaking wind or coughing. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people slept two and three to a bed, when there was a bed. Four or five children might sleep on the same cot or pallet. Because of lack of space and lack of beds, they slept packed together on ticks stuffed with leaves or straw or corn shucks. In cold weather the several bodies in bed together helped them keep warm in a corner or loft far from the fireplace.

There are many accounts of travelers stopping for the night at cabins or houses along their way. Common courtesy of the time and place required that visitors be invited to dinner and to stay the night. In a cabin where ten people normally slept, the visitor would be invited to unroll his blanket near the fireplace and undress or half undress in the dark or semidark. A kind of privacy was created by everyone ignoring each other. And even if you woke in the night and heard the sounds of lovemaking nearby, you pretended not to notice. That the crowding in the cabins and little houses was no hindrance to lovemaking is proved by the number of children born on the frontier to families such as the Bryans and Boones. Judging by the birthrate, the hardships and crowding seem to have been a spur to fertility, not a restraint.

One of the paradoxes of this frontier living is that settlers did not congregate in villages, as most of their ancestors had in Britain and on the Continent, but moved into the woods and cleared an isolated place. The large families might live close together, clearing land in common, working, eating, sleeping in very intimate proximity. But in general new arrivals moved far out into the valleys on their own claims. This apparent contradiction is related to another paradox of the life of Daniel Boone: though an accomplished and legendary hunter and trapper, scout and explorer, gone for months and sometimes even years at a time, he was also an affectionate, hardworking, loved, and respected family man when home, at once a loner and a beloved father, husband, and son. Virtually all relatives and acquaintances who later left accounts of him spoke with pronounced respect and affection for the man, and many followed him wherever he moved.

In these early years of their marriage, Boone farmed and Rebecca almost certainly grew a large garden. They would have had at least one milk cow, a horse, chickens, and hogs that ran loose in the woods, rooting and feeding on acorns and anything else they could find. Daniel worked at times as a blacksmith and gunsmith, and he hauled produce to Salisbury, the county seat, in his wagon and returned with storebought goods. He preferred working as a drover to farming. But even then his main business in the summer was not corn growing or tobacco raising but deer hunting. The best practice, Ted Franklin Belue tells us, was to gather “
deerskin in the red before the frosts
plumped the skin and blued them.” A rule of thumb in those days was to trap in the months ending in the letter
r
, plus January and February, and hunt deer in the other months.

As the deer were hunted out closer to the Yadkin, Daniel had to range farther into the hills for the bucks that provided the core of his summer income. Though he sometimes had companions, it’s said he preferred to hunt alone. Deer hunting then and now is done by waiting near a deer trail early in the morning, or late in the evening, for a buck to wander into range. A marksman like Daniel Boone would choose
to shoot the deer either in the heart or in the head. A head shot would not damage the hide, but it was riskier at a great distance.

“
There is a period in the history
of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are ‘the best men,’ as the Algonquins called them,” Thoreau says in
Walden
. Boone’s lifelong obsession with hunting shows that in some important way he never quite shed his youthfulness. As a boy Daniel had learned to approach deer by crawling or easing closer while their heads were down grazing, then freezing while their heads came up. No doubt he sometimes used such an Indian-like technique, especially for hunting with spear or bow at close range. But with his long rifle, Daniel probably more often waited for the buck to wander within range and into the open.

To carry a deer a long way through the woods is hard work, even for someone as strong as Boone. Modern hunters use wheeled carriers and all-terrain vehicles to haul game back to camp. Horses were used in earlier times. It is brutal work to carry for miles through thickets and over rough ground a deer that may weigh 100 or 150 pounds. The method used in Boone’s time, when they were hunting without a horse, not far from camp, was “
hoppusing
,” a technique learned from the Indians. The carcass was strapped over the hunter’s shoulders by strips of hide called tugs.
Hoppus
was used as a verb, as in “He hoppused the deer home.” As Daniel ranged farther into the hills in his hunting, he did not return home at night but instead camped and skinned the carcasses, returning days or weeks later with hides strapped to his packhorse. A deer hide weighed about two and a half pounds and sold for forty cents a pound. A horse of that time, typically fourteen hands high, could carry about two hundred pounds.

A story that illustrates Boone’s character, and the extraordinary burden placed on women such as Rebecca, was told after his death by members of his family. One of their neighbors in the Bryan settlement on the Yadkin was Samuel Tate, a frequent hunting companion, older than Daniel. When he returned from a hunt and found his own family
out of flour, Daniel went over to Morgan Bryan’s place to thresh out and grind some rye. On the way Boone stopped at the Tate house and found their supplies running low because Samuel was away on a hunt, and Mrs. Tate was sick. On his way back home Daniel dropped off some of his own rye flour with the Tates.

A few days later Tate returned from his hunt and angrily confronted Daniel, asking what right Boone had to stick his nose in Tate’s business. And Tate accused Boone to others of flirting with the young Mrs. Tate. “
Later Boone met with him and gave him
a severe flogging,” Nathan Boone told Lyman Draper, “and said he would do it again if he ever threw out similar intimations.”

There are only a few stories of Boone losing his temper in his long life. This story is one of maybe a half-dozen remembered instances when anger overcame him. Tate’s ingratitude and suggestion that he was casting a lustful eye on Mrs. Tate were too much even for Daniel. The story reveals a good deal about the good-natured Daniel, about the willingness of frontier folk to help each other, and about how on occasion Daniel, like his father, could become a fighting Quaker. Because of the dangers and hardships of the frontier, settlers learned to share and share alike. It was a generosity of spirit Boone carried into later times, and his generosity then was to prove a liability. And the story also shows how Daniel rarely held a grudge, because he later hunted again and again with Samuel Tate, in North Carolina and Kentucky.

But the account suggests something else as well, how throughout his life some other men tended to be jealous of Daniel. Saucy Jack, the Catawba, was jealous of his reputation and skill as a marksman and hunter. The older Samuel Tate was jealous of Boone’s youth and attractiveness to women, as well as of his considerable hunting skills. Later, men like Richard Callaway would be jealous of Boone’s leadership, of the way people just seemed to look up to him and follow him. And still later many would be jealous of his fame, after Filson’s biography made him a legend in America and in Europe. The legend of Daniel Boone
would be both a blessing and a curse for the rest of his life. Some of his legal and business difficulties in later life had their origin in jealousy of his accomplishments and his reputation for accomplishment.

Samuel Tate must have been a difficult man, for there is another story about Boone’s beating him up in a later fight about hunting territory. Tate kept claiming more and more of the hunting range for himself, and Boone kept giving in to him, until it seemed Tate was claiming all the territory for his own hunting and bragging he was the better hunter. He also bragged he could whip Boone any time he chose to. “
I believe I could whip you
,” Boone said to Tate, and beat the older hunter until he was in no shape to hunt anywhere for several weeks.

I
N THE LATE
1750s the Yadkin Valley was attacked in a number of Indian raids. Shawnees to the north, from as far away as Ohio, struck settlements along the Carolina frontier, taking lives and scalps as well as supplies. Encouraged by the French, who were still conducting their long war with the British, the Indians surprised the settlements again and again. Several times in the early years of their marriage the Boones had to retreat to forts. This was called forting up, and while settlers were gathered in the forts, their crops were often destroyed and their cabins burned.

In 1756 Fort Dobbs had been constructed a few miles south and east of the South Fork of the Yadkin. The commander of the local militia was Maj. Hugh Waddell, and Boone was an active member of the defense forces in the region. “
Fort Dobbs was an oblong
space forty-three by fifty-three feet, girt by walls about twelve feet high, consisting of double rows of logs standing on end; earth dug from the ditch which surrounded the fort was piled against the feet of these palisades, inside and out, to steady them.”

Cherokees, from the extended federation of towns across the mountains, raided the Yadkin settlements also. Though allied with the English, the Cherokees resented the settlements that encroached farther and farther into their hunting grounds. Even if a war party
only burned crops and stole horses, rumors of murder and scalp taking spread through the frontier.

Closer to home on the Yadkin, gangs of white outlaws preyed on the scattered farms, stealing and killing and sometimes kidnapping women and girls. Spreading rumors of an Indian attack, these outlaws plundered farms after the settlers had hurried to forts or hidden in the woods. An especially notorious gang of horse thieves and robbers was active near the Yadkin. Once they kidnapped a young girl, and her father organized a posse of more than forty men to search for her. As the minutemen rode into the woods, they met the girl running out. Her captors had gotten drunk and begun to fight about who would take his pleasure with her first. She led the rescuers back to the camp, where three men as well as women and children were seized. The leader of the outlaws escaped, but three of his cohorts were taken back to Salisbury to be tried and hanged.

The rumor was that these outlaw gangs planned to lead the French and their Indian allies to the settlements in the backcountry. The gangs were hated as much for this suspected treachery as for their stealing. Once, a nearby farmer was discovered with a cache of stolen goods. Persuaded by a little torture, he confessed and led the sheriff and his posse to the outlaw lair in the woods. The leaders were captured and hanged, but the farmer was later murdered for his betrayal. The Yadkin was the lawless West of its time, both literally and figuratively. A missionary traveling in the Yadkin region in this period wrote, “
The people about here are wild
.”

The conflict with the Indians was more often than not started by the whites. Indians were sometimes attacked and killed seemingly at random.
A group of Cherokees
in May 1758 stole some wandering horses in far southwestern Virginia, not thinking it wrong, as they saw it often done by the whites. The owner of the horses, forming a posse, pursued the Indians and killed twelve or fifteen. The relatives of the dead Indians vowed revenge. In the fall of 1759 Cherokees began attacking the settlements of western North Carolina more consistently.
Enraged because British soldiers had raped several Cherokee women and scalped and murdered braves, the war chief Oconastota, overriding the diplomatic Attakullakulla, the “Little Carpenter,” led his warriors against the Yadkin settlements. Major Waddell raised a force of fifty men to march to Fort Dobbs.
Boone later told his son Nathan
that he had served with Waddell at Fort Dobbs.

In February of 1760 the Cherokees attacked the fort, and Waddell let himself and a small force be decoyed into the open by a seemingly small band of Indians. They walked into an ambush of more than sixty warriors and barely managed to get back into the fort. Fearing that the Indians had attacked their homes, Boone and a number of militiamen slipped out of the stockade to return to the Yadkin. Their fears were confirmed when they found dead, scalped bodies at an outlying farm. The Cherokees had killed more than twelve people on this raid.