Boone: A Biography (14 page)

In all its variations, this has been one of the favorite stories about Boone for the past two centuries and more. For some it has illustrated what a lazy, easygoing man Boone was, staying off in the woods hunting and gallivanting, maybe cohabiting with an Indian wife, while Rebecca did the farmwork and raised the children, not knowing if Daniel was alive or dead, but assuming he was dead. With the desires of any healthy woman, she had sought the comfort of another man.
When Boone returns, he is so shiftless and feckless he doesn’t seem to care much one way or another. But others have seen the story as an illustration of Boone’s tolerance and large spirit. He understands the trials and temptations Rebecca has known, and when told the child is Ned’s or his brother Squire’s, he says, “At least it’s in the family,” his wit and humor intact. In no version does Daniel get angry, accuse his wife, or threaten to leave her. At the very least he accepts the inevitable; at the very best he takes the child as his own and leads his family back to Sugartree Creek on the Yadkin.

It is an interesting fact that Jemima became Boone’s favorite child. It was she he rescued in a daring pursuit when she was kidnapped at Boonesborough in 1776. It was Jemima who waited for him to return to Boonesborough after he was captured by the Shawnees in 1778, when the rest of the family, assuming he was dead, returned to North Carolina. It was with Jemima that Boone lived much of the time after the death of Rebecca in Missouri, near the end of his life.

Those who argue against the truth of the story point out that the treaty with the Cherokees was signed at the Long Island of the Holston November 19, 1761, and after that Boone likely left the militia and returned to Virginia and brought his family back to the Yadkin, in plenty of time to father Jemima. They also point out that Ned had recently married Rebecca’s sister Martha, and it is unlikely he would have been sleeping with his double sister-in-law, Rebecca. Daniel’s brother Squire was serving his apprenticeship as a blacksmith in Maryland at this time. They also note that the
witnesses such as James Norman have so many facts wrong
that their stories are not to be credited. All versions of the story contradict each other.

It’s likely that Boone did return to his family in Virginia during the 1761–62 winter and bring them back to Sugartree. The biographer H. Addington Bruce stated flatly that “
he brought his family back to the Yadkin
as soon as peace had been made.”
The genealogist Spraker
says that Jemima was born in North Carolina. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise. With Daniel’s known distaste for farming, he would
have brought Rebecca and the children to help him plant a crop before he went on his summer hunt. Culpeper, Virginia, is about 250 miles from the Yadkin, a week’s journey by horseback.

Folklore grows from the pleasure of telling a good story, adding an even better surprise and punch line. In the many versions of this story of the illegitimacy of one of Boone’s children we see folklore come to life and grow. If a story is good enough, it takes on a vitality, a kind of truth of its own, with little connection to its source. Whether true or not, the story of Jemima’s begetting adds something important to the portrait of Rebecca that has come down to us. Her beauty and strength and grace and kindness are mentioned in every account. But the story of the child conceived with another man while Daniel was away and presumed dead makes her vivid in a special way, giving her a life independent of Daniel. She is not just the patient, handsome wife toiling while her husband is away. She is also human, with fears and desires, insecurities and hopes. Without Daniel, her life would still go on. Assuming that her husband is dead, she is lonely and in need of love, and she turns to a man nearby who looks like her husband, then must live with the scandal of the new pregnancy, and anxiety about her husband’s possible return.

Many years after Boone’s death, Draper corresponded with an old man named Stephen Hempstead, who claimed to have heard a version of the story from Boone himself when they were neighbors in Missouri. In this clearly apocryphal version Boone said he had been captured by Indians and when he returned home had found his wife with a new baby. “
She had supposed him dead
etc. etc. he inquired who would be the father of the child when born, she told him a certain Boone he answered, you need not distress yourself about it.” He told her not to worry for he had one or two Indian wives while away. “Mrs. Boone was present at the time he told me,” the old neighbor related to Draper and “she made her knitting needles fly very fast I assure you.”

In the Victorian era the stories of the illegitimate child were suppressed by several Boone biographers who thought they might damage the reputation of the frontier hero. The Reverend John Mason Peck,
who interviewed Boone in 1818 but did not publish his biography until 1847, avoided the story altogether and explained that Boone was free to go into the wilderness for long periods because he had large sons who could do the farmwork for Rebecca. Each age wants to see its heroes in its own image, in ways that reflect the pieties and sentiments of its day. As Faragher reminds us, it is important to remember that
frontier culture in the eighteenth century was
much rougher and more tolerant than that of the nineteenth-century society.

In one version of the tale of the illegitimate child, told by a woman, Rebecca gets the last line. “
You had better have staid at home
and got it yourself,” she says to Boone.

T
HE
B
OONES
’ fifth child, Levina, was not born until March 23, 1766, about four years after the return to Sugartree Creek on the Yadkin. Whether this reflects discord between Daniel and Rebecca we cannot know. But we do know this was a period of increasing economic difficulty for Boone. His family and his responsibilities were growing, and the game on which he depended for his livelihood was receding farther and farther. As more settlers moved in, and the valley was safer from Indian attacks, he had to range farther to the west to find deer and beavers, mink and otter. It was a dilemma he faced after each of his moves. Wherever Boone went others would follow and soon the game was thinned out, the streams empty of fish and fur. He and others like him helped destroy the very thing that drew them to the woods. One cannot kill thirty deer in a day or ninety-plus bears in one season and keep repeating the pattern in the same place for long.

One of the reasons that Boone was attracted to regions that still had Indians was that when the Indians left, the game soon disappeared. Only hunters like himself, willing to risk hunting in Indian country, found the best game. As the settlements moved westward, there was a window of a few years when he could hunt the way he preferred, with the Indians and among the Indians.

This collision between love of hunting and hunting skill, and a
sustainable ecology, is at the heart of the contradiction in Boone’s life, and the history of modern America. The prowess and persistence of men like Boone made the decline of the game inevitable. There is some evidence that Boone began to understand this later in his life or at least had an inkling of the consequence of settlement and sustained hunting. In the charter of rules voted on at Boonesborough in May 1775 he urged restrictions on the wanton slaughter of game. But there is little evidence that he restrained himself in his commercial hunting for deer hides and furs. He never took part in the mass killing of buffalo for sport and for their tongues, but he was very much a part of the rush to strip the wilderness of its finest yield. In his time, of course, the wilderness and game seemed endless. The very world he sought to flee followed him and planted itself in his tracks.

Much has been written about Daniel Boone as debtor. Many documents showing sums he owed date from the early 1760s. Already, by the time he brought his family back from Culpeper, Virginia, there was an established pattern that would recur throughout much of the rest of his life. He goes on a long hunt and needs supplies, provisions, powder, lead; he needs steel traps, sometimes a new horse, tools for rifle repair. His growing family needs provisions, cloth, tools for farming, shoes, coffee or tea. He buys from merchants in Salisbury, who are happy to extend him credit, for he is an outstanding hunter and popular with his neighbors. When he returns from the hunt in the spring he has furs that bring in money, but the cash never seems to go far enough. He pays some of his debts, but others are left outstanding, and with interest the debts keep growing. And besides, he needs more supplies, not to mention seeds and a new plow for spring planting. And Rebecca and the children need new clothes. Interest accumulates on the debts he can’t pay until the harvest is in or until he returns from the next long hunt.

Balzac is supposed to have said that most people cannot appreciate that a debt is an act of imagination. A debt is a gesture of faith, of confidence in the future, a reaching forward to make use of wealth not
yet acquired. Debtors, like gamblers, live in an uneasy state of hope and despair but try to dwell on hope. The qualities that made Boone such a legendary man of the frontier also contributed to the mire of debt he never seemed able to struggle out of, for by the time he paid off one debt he had already acquired others. His hopefulness, his curiosity, his forward-looking faith in himself and others, his confidence in his destiny—characteristics that made him a successful hunter and explorer and leader—seemed to cripple him when it came to business. His way of dealing with the troubles in town, the mounting figures in ledgers, and the summonses to court was to plunge into the mountains again, to harvest hides and meat and furs and ginseng to pay the debts, but also to forget the unpleasant consequences of his borrowing.

It has been said that Boone had the temperament of an artist, that he was a poet of the woods, the hunt, the exploration of mysteries beyond the next ridge. Boone was described by the early biographer Timothy Flint as
essentially a poet
. He was an acute observer, studying the signs and weather and the Natives, and he felt an ancient kinship with the forest. He loved contemplation and solitude, yet was a good companion on the trail, popular with neighbors, fellow hunters, and scouts. The Indians seemed to be in awe of him.

But back in the settlements, in the world of the towns and the legal world of the court, the father world, Boone appeared to be out of his depth. Again and again, throughout his life, instead of registering a deed, doing the paperwork, paying off a debt, reading the fine print of a contract, he ignored business, forgot business, and returned to the hunt, to the storytelling by the fireside, to the trail that went on to the next ridge. Business did not interest him for long. He always convinced himself that he could put the matter off and catch up on the mere details later. This attitude hampered him even in the early years of his marriage. He was known already in the Yadkin Valley as a “
slow pay” and as “not thrifty
.” His taxes often went unpaid. These habits led to disaster later when he was famous and got into the business of surveying and trading land on a big scale. Then his carelessness with details
embroiled him in lawsuits and debts that hounded him almost until the end of his long life.

His tranquillity was disturbed by the unpleasant facts. Seventeen sixty-four was a hard year. Daniel had to sell the one tract of land he had been given by his father. The house on Sugartree Creek was on Bryan land. After 1764 he may not have owned one piece of property, in a region where even the poor often had hundreds of acres.

Frustrated by debt and failure as a farmer, Boone sought partners and backers for his expeditions across the mountains. He must have felt he was intended for something greater than just gathering deer hides in the Blue Ridge Mountains. According to Archibald Henderson, Boone was hired by the lawyer Richard Henderson and his associates in Salisbury to spy and explore land over the mountains as early as 1764. Hunters reported encountering Boone and Richard Callaway and Henry Skaggs as far west as the Clinch River in future Tennessee at that time. Boone met a group, known as the Blevens Connection, on their return from a long hunt in Kentucky and told them he was studying the “
geography and locography of these woods
.” The Richard Callaway who accompanied Boone on this expedition was the nephew of Col. Richard Callaway with whom Boone would associate in Kentucky. On one of these early expeditions to the Cumberland Mountains, Boone was reported to have first sighted a large herd of buffalo from a peak and cried out, “
I am richer than the man
mentioned in Scripture who owned cattle on a thousand hills—I own the wild beasts of more than a thousand valleys.”

Nathan Boone would later say
that his father was not employed by Henderson and company until around 1774, but it is possible, even likely, that Richard Henderson, on his own account, paid Boone to report on the country he had explored across the mountains years before the Louisa Company was formed in 1774, or at the very least Henderson helped Boone avoid jail for debt, in return for information about the lands across the mountains. Archibald Henderson tended to exaggerate the importance
of Richard Henderson to Boone’s career. It is more likely Boone’s association with Henderson began in 1769 or after, not in 1764.

Boone’s father, Squire, died on January 2, 1765, and was buried in Joppa Cemetery in Mocksville, North Carolina. He was sixty-nine years old. The tombstone reads:

Squire Boone

Departed

this life in

the sixty ninth year

of his age

in they year of our Lord 1765

Geneiary tha 2
.

The inscription may have been cut by Daniel himself, for the imaginative spelling resembles that in many of the documents in Daniel’s handwriting. The symbol of the point within a circle carved in the stone suggests that Squire was indeed a Freemason. In those days the sign was most often intended to show the duty of the individual brother to “
God and man by means of the circumference
.” But it was also a sign often taken to mean “the Divine Spirit indwelling creation and abiding in the nature of man.” It is possible that the sign was used to illustrate Tertullian’s definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. According to
A Dictionary of Freemasonry
, it is
a symbol of the creation of the world
.