Boone: A Biography (16 page)

It was a good time to get out of North Carolina, especially for a man in debt. But Daniel Boone had taken no part in the local rebellion, the Regulator disturbances. All his life he tended to avoid political disputes and confrontations. His peaceableness cost him dearly later, but he preferred to fight with the elements and with the mostly uncharted wilderness to the west. And by 1769 he and Findley and Stewart were bending all their talents and energy toward the quest for Kentucky. Only if they could reach the Great Meadow, the Middle Ground, the Bluegrass island, would their lives be renewed and their fortunes prosper.

Over the years there has been much discussion about the origins and
meaning of the name
Kentucky
. It was once fashionable to say that the word meant, in Cherokee or Shawnee, “
the dark and bloody ground
.” But according to George R. Stewart in
American Place Names
, the word comes from the Iroquois,
Kanta-ke
, “
the meadow-land
,” a combination of
kenta
(level) and
aki
(place). As early as 1753 a traveler referred to the Shawnee Blue Lick town as on the “Cantucky River.” The Shawnee name for a town on a tributary of the Red River was
Eskippaki-thiki
. It is easy to see why the early explorers and surveyors preferred the Iroquois word
Kanta-ke
as a name for the region.

But many people have continued to believe that the name
Kentucky
means “dark and bloody ground.” One story is that a Cherokee called Dragging Canoe described the region that way to Boone in 1775 at Sycamore Shoals. But Boone was not present at the signing of the Sycamore Shoals treaty. Others have suggested that Kentucky was called the dark and bloody ground because the Ohio had been called by some the “
Bloody River
.”
It has even been suggested
, as a joke, that
Kaintuck
comes from
canetuck
because of all the canebrakes in the region.

But there are other arguments about the origin of the name
Kentucky
. Some said it was a Wyandotte name meaning “
the land of tomorrow
.” And John Mason Peck, writing in 1847, said, “
Kain-tuck-ee
is a Shawanese [Shawnee] word
, and signified ‘at the head of the river.’” Still others have argued that the name, in any case, is an invention of the whites. It has been suggested that the name
Kentucke
stuck because
it was favored by the Cherokees
. Those coming into Kentucky through Cumberland Gap passed through Cherokee lands to get there.

Some words have a resonance, a color, and are memorable even before we know what they mean. We love to say them just to feel them in the air and on our tongue. Some words have a peculiar rightness and catch on like a bit of poetry.
Kanta-ke
is such a term, and people have never tired of saying it since it was first heard by whites in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is a symmetry to the word, to the balance of vowels and consonants, beginning with the
k
sound and ending with the
k
sound. And of course the name was thought to have an etymological
and semantic rightness too.
Whatever they called it
, those who sought Kentucky already saw it as a mythic, Edenic place. Whatever the etymology of the word, Kentucky certainly seemed like the land of the future to Boone and Findley and many other explorers of the time.

It appears that Boone had reasons to leave the Yadkin, perhaps as strong as the lure of Kentucky. He had accumulated more debts than property, and from time to time had been taken to court over unpaid debts, some as large as fifty pounds. And since his father had died in 1765, Boone was free to make bold moves, and take his place in the world. The prominent businessman, lawyer, and later judge Richard Henderson had prosecuted Boone and would secure a warrant for his arrest in 1770, after Daniel had left for Kentucky. Boone was sued at least twice in 1770 while he was away in Kentucky.

In the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh
we find this record of the
Salisbury District Superior Court:

W
ILLIAMS
& H
ENDERSON
E
SQ. VS
D
ANIEL
B
OONE

Debt,

4 cont. 56

Conditions performed

Jury empanelled & sworn find the conditions was performed. Assess damages to 20.00 sixpence costs

And for the same court in September 1770 we find the following record:

No. 105

H
UGH
M
ONTGOMERY VS
. D
ANIEL
B
OONE

Debt.

Judgement Con__by Avery for sum of 61.13.2 proc. Money & interest from the 20th March

1770 till paid 7 Costs—

Richard Henderson and Nathaniel Hart were among the many entrepreneurs and land speculators in backwoods North Carolina. Like
others, including George Washington and Patrick Henry in Virginia, they had their eye on the fortune to be made in western lands bought up cheaply or claimed for nothing and later sold to settlers. With a relatively small investment one might become wealthy and powerful as the territory was developed, with cities and towns and commerce in the future.

As mentioned earlier, there is a good deal of disagreement about the beginning of Boone’s relationship with Richard Henderson and his partners Thomas and Nathaniel Hart and John Williams. Thomas Hart was the sheriff who presumably served the warrant for Boone’s arrest, which Richard Henderson and his law partner John Williams had issued.

The Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark, among others, has argued that Boone and his companions may have been working for Henderson as early as 1769 on their first expedition to Trans-Allegheny lands. At the very least Boone was spying out the land for Henderson, perhaps conducting a rough survey. As Thomas D. Clark put it, “He wasn’t just bird counting.” Archibald Henderson and others have claimed Boone was in the employ of Richard Henderson as scout and spy as early as 1764, when Boone was exploring the Tennessee country. Many agree that Boone must have been serving Henderson in some capacity when he set out for Kentucky in 1769. Henderson was an eloquent and famous lawyer, a rich man, and a visionary. “He was considered the Patrick Henry of North Carolina.” John Mason Peck, who interviewed Boone in his last years in Missouri, stated flatly that Boone’s 1769 expedition to Kentucky was funded by Richard Henderson. “
As confidential agent of the land company
, Boone carried with him letters and instructions for his guidance upon this extended tour of exploration.”

Because of his great skill at scouting through the wilderness unseen, exploring dangerous and unknown regions, there was often a hint of espionage about Boone’s activities. His ability to remain hidden, to observe, to return and report what he had seen, makes him appear a bit
of a spy from first to last. And more than that, he was a kind of double agent, moving between Indian and white culture, friendly with either and both, making some wonder where his true loyalty lay. He was exploring in the interests of his own curiosity and plans and for sponsors such as Richard Henderson. Because he could slip in and out of and function between these worlds so easily, he would be seen by some as a kind of secret agent, by others as a traitor. With his acute senses and capacious memory, Boone had the frontier world under surveillance. Sometimes he was working for Richard Henderson, sometimes for William Russell or the government of Virginia. Mostly he was spying in the service of his great curiosity and relish for the unexplored country.

In any case there are no documents proving that Boone was in the employ of Henderson before 1774. In his interviews with Lyman Draper, Nathan said
his father was not employed
by Henderson’s company until 1774 or 1775. But Nathan was not born until 1781, and while he is one of the most reliable informants about Boone’s life, even he is sometimes mistaken. And it does seem at least plausible that Henderson agreed to continuances and delays in the debt cases against Boone in exchange for information about the mysterious and alluring land over the mountains. As far as we know, Boone was never actually put in jail for his debts. And it is possible that a lawyer and businessman such as Henderson might be filing a suit for a client on the one hand while negotiating with the defendant on the other. Stranger conflicts of interest have been known in the pursuit of business and the practice of law. Richard Henderson is on record as saying, “
[Boone] had the honor
of having more suits entered against him for debt than any other man of his day, chiefly small debts of five pounds and under contracted for lead and powder.”

Archibald Henderson wrote that Boone
was under a pledge of secrecy about his early employment by Richard Henderson and that he never violated that confidence. Whatever his role in the 1769 Kentucky expedition, events intervened in the career of Richard Henderson at
just that moment to prevent him from openly pursuing any western land scheme for a few years. He was appointed judge for the North Carolina Superior Court in 1769, and while he served on the bench, he was not free to proceed with such ventures, which had been declared illegal by the colonial governors of North Carolina and Virginia.

A descendant of Nathaniel Hart later said
it was Boone’s colorful descriptions of Kentucky after he returned in 1771 that inspired the businessmen to form Henderson and Company and plan the purchase of western land. This story is probably true but doesn’t preclude an earlier personal interest in Boone’s explorations on the part of Henderson and Hart. Many mammoth projects such as the Transylvania Company have their seeds in smaller, tentative enterprises. And significant actions are also taken for mixed and even contradictory motives.

L
EAVING HIS
debts and obligations, hardscrabble farming, and political unrest behind, Boone was reaching out toward a world of unlimited freedom, where great rivers chased themselves all the way to the horizon, and the land was hardly touched by the surveyor’s chain or described in courthouse deed. There are particular events that seem to define a life on the way to becoming a legend. For Washington, it is the winter at Valley Forge, and crossing the Delaware. For Franklin it is the key on the kite string that touches lightning, and negotiating the alliance with the French that guaranteed the survival of the rebellion fumbling its way toward a republic. For Boone, it is the image of a man finding his way through a narrow gap into the Eden of Kentucky and leading others there, guaranteeing that the new nation about to be born would extend over the mountains and encompass the West. Whatever other deeds he did or did not do, this is the image that has stuck.

Of the party of six—Boone, Findley, Stewart, James Mooney, Joseph Holder, and William Cooley—three had been beyond the mountains before: Boone and Findley, of course, and John Stewart, who the previous year had gone on the hunting adventure with Benjamin Cutbirth
and a few others all the way into future Tennessee and had carried their furs and hides to market in New Orleans. Nathan many years later said Boone had great confidence in his brother-in-law John Stewart. “
My father even said he never
had a brother he thought more of than he did of John Stewart. He had all the confidence in him that one man could have in another; he was faithful in the performance of his promises, a most essential requisite, as Father always said, in a hunting companion.” Stewart knew how to handle a rifle and he could be depended on to be at the right place at the time he had agreed to.

On May 1, 1769, the party climbed the mountain chain by following Elk Creek in western North Carolina and crossed the Blue Ridge at Cook’s Gap into a high mountain meadow. In the following days they crossed a series of mountain chains, Stone Mountain and the Iron Mountain range. Somewhere near Wolf Hills they joined the Great Warrior’s Path, an ancient trail that ran across the southwestern part of Virginia, crossing the Clinch and then Powell’s River, then turned north through Ouasiota, or Cave Gap, which Dr. Thomas Walker or others had named the Cumberland Gap.
Ouasioto
,
according to some
, is a Wyandotte word. Others have suggested it is a Shawnee word:
scioto
means “deer
,” therefore, the gap is Deer Pass. Walker named the gap for the Duke of Cumberland, and he or someone else named the central river in Kentucky the Louisa for the duke’s sister.

To the modern eye the Warrior’s Path, called Athiamiowee, or “
Path of the Armed Ones
” by the Indians, might have been hardly discernible in some places. Where it followed a buffalo trace along a stream or through a gap in the mountains, it was a worn track. In places Indian trails were well marked; in others, almost invisible to whites. Indians trails usually ran on high ground in the mountains, out along ridges to avoid thickets and small streams. William E. Myer, in
Indian Trails of the Southeast
, tells us that “
some parts of [the trails] had become worn down
below the surface of the soil, while other stretches might be almost invisible, save to the practiced eye of the Indian.” But to a Native American or a white woodsman such as Boone, the path
was legible, running out between trees and skirting large rocks, crossing a creek on stepping stones or at a shallow ford, crossing a meadow at a level place, avoiding marshy places where tracks would be conspicuous. In places, war parties had left signs cut on trees or scratched or painted on rocks, perhaps to brag about who had come this way, who had made a successful raid against the Iroquois in the north, the Cherokees in the south, the Shawnees in the west.

Boone and his party followed the Warrior’s Path across Moccasin Gap to the Clinch River. Then they climbed Powell’s Mountain and ascended Wallen’s Ridge into the valley of Powell’s River. At Powell’s Valley they met a group led by Joseph Martin, who were clearing land for a settlement. Martin’s Fort was the westernmost settlement of the English colonies at that time.