Boone: A Biography (25 page)

His actions during Lord Dunmore’s War enhanced Boone’s status and reputation. His leadership was recognized by a petition signed by the men who had served under him, asking that Boone be promoted to captain. Capt. Daniel Smith wrote to Col. William Preston, “
Mr. Boon is an excellent woodsman
. If that only would qualify him for the Office nobody would be more proper.” Boone was given the promotion,
and from Smith’s phrasing we get a sense of how Boone was viewed at the time by some of his upper-class associates. His integrity and leadership were recognized by those with power and influence. But officers such as Preston and Russell still viewed him first as a hunter and woodsman, not quite of their class or status.

Class, the manner of a gentleman, the air of authority, were very important in the eighteenth century, even in the frontier valleys. Boone was a leader, admired by those he led, but he was
different
. It is important to keep that difference in mind when considering his later troubled career in business and politics and militia companies. Though an acknowledged and even celebrated leader, Boone never did quite fit in with the ruling class in the new territories. He was too much the woodsman and hunter, even a “white Indian.”

With this promotion Boone became Capt. Daniel Boone and he would be addressed by this semimilitary, semicourtesy title until he was later promoted again. He would carry the commission with him in the years ahead in case he needed proof of his status as an officer and a gentleman. His commission was signed by Lord Dunmore himself. Boone kept the document in his “budget,” or carrying pouch, until many years later it was included in an application for a land grant and lost among the bureaucratic proceedings. The commission was proof of his recognition in the world of men, as well as his achievement in the mother world of the forest.

As a captain Boone was given command of three forts on the Clinch: Fort Russell, at Castle Wood; Moore’s, a few miles from Castle Wood; and Blackmore’s, twenty miles farther south. But by that time the war was winding down. Soon after the Battle of Point Pleasant, Chief Cornstalk and other Shawnees signed the treaty of Camp Charlotte, agreeing to give up hunting rights in Kentucky in exchange for guarantees that English settlers would stay south of the Ohio River. But as with many treaties with the whites, not all Shawnees agreed. The Shawnees were divided and many did not concede the hunting rights in the Great Meadow. And certainly the British could not guarantee
that people from the colonies would not try to settle north of the Ohio River. The treaty was more the beginning of hostilities than an end to them.

In a letter to Lord Dunmore
at the close of the campaign, written down by Col. John Gibson and translated and delivered by Simon Girty, Chief Logan said:

Colonel Cresap, the last spring
, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relatives of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance.

For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace; but do not harbor the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his own heel to save his life.

Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.

Before he was released from his command on November 20, 1774, Boone had to sign forms for reimbursement of those who had provided supplies for the forts. “
Rachel Duncin, one horse
October 7, 1774 . . . one Beef Cowe prased at 3.0.0,” one document read.

1775

Once Lord Dunmore’s War was over, Boone, like hundreds of others, turned his thoughts back to Kentucky. The hostilities had merely been a pause in the rush to claim the Great Meadow. And like any stream obstructed, the current swelled behind the barrier to overwhelming force once the dam was breeched. In late 1774 or early 1775 Boone reopened or began his connection with Richard Henderson in North Carolina, where Henderson had completed his term as a judge.

It is not known how Henderson made contact again with Boone. It may have been in connection with Boone’s debts in the Yadkin region, or a warrant issued by his creditors. It is possible Henderson had kept in touch with Boone since the time he returned from Kentucky in 1771 or, indeed, since he first went to Kentucky in 1769. “
Boone’s report of the west
fired these promoters with new enthusiasm.” What is certain is that on August 27, 1774, the Articles of Association of the Louisa Company were drafted and signed at Hillsborough by Henderson and his partners, and sometime in the winter of 1774–75 they commissioned Boone to go among the Cherokee towns and negotiate the sale of Kentucky lands to the Louisa Company.

Boone had already given them a vivid description of Kentucky, for one of the partners, Richard Henderson’s brother Nathaniel, wrote about this time, “
To enter uppon a detail of the Beuty
& Goodness of
our Country would be a task too arduous . . . let it suffice to tell you it far exceeds any country I ever saw or herd of. I’m conscious its out of the power of any man to make you clearly sensible of the great Beuty and Richness of Kentucky.”

In the late fall of 1774 Henderson and his partner Nathaniel Hart visited several Cherokee towns themselves and made a tentative agreement to purchase the Cherokee claims to Kentucky for several thousand pounds’ worth of goods. Chief Attakullakulla and other leaders, including a clan matron, or “chieftess,” returned with Henderson to Cross-Creek, later Fayetteville, North Carolina, to pick the goods they wanted in trade. There followed weeks of negotiations over the list of blankets and rifles, knives and trinkets. Attakullakulla, who was very old, was a legend among the Cherokees and colonial administrators. When younger he had accompanied a delegation to London and had an audience with the king. He was called the Little Carpenter. Felix Walker would later describe him: “
Like as a white carpenter could
make every joint and notch fit in wood, so he could bring all his views to fill and fit their places in the political machinery of his nation . . . about ninety . . . I scarcely believe he would have exceeded more in weight than a pound for each year of his life.”

This bargaining with the Cherokees for the ownership of all the land between the Kentucky River and the Cumberland River’s mouth on the Ohio is one of the oddest episodes in frontier history. The colonial governors of North Carolina and Virginia had forbidden anyone to try to buy or sell or settle Kentucky, claiming the land belonged to the westward extending colonies. Pennsylvania had issued a similar warning. Officially, the western lands were to be divided among officers who had served in the French and Indian War. But there was a sliver of legal logic in Henderson’s plan, deriving from the 1768 Treaty of Hard Labor, when the British acknowledged that the Cherokee nation did hold rights over the Kentucky country, or at least part of it.
And even Gov. Josiah Martin of North Carolina
conceded that whites had a right to “lease” land from the Cherokees, as did Patrick Henry.
Richard Henderson was a brilliant, ambitious, resourceful man. He had already gone over the heads of the colonial governors and consulted the government in London. “Lord Mansfield gave Judge Henderson the ‘sanction of his great authority in favor of the purchase.’” The letter of sanction was duly sent. “A true copy, made in London, April 1, 1772, was transmitted to Judge Henderson.”
It was all a charade
, since the Indians referred to in the document were of India, not North America.

Whatever the claims and warnings of the Crown governments, surveyors and settlers, hunters and trappers, scouts and speculators, were pouring into Kentucky by the day. Most came down the Ohio from Fort Pitt, but others traveled through Cumberland Gap from the south and over the mountains from Virginia, down the Big Sandy and Red rivers.
In April 1769 Pennsylvania
had opened a land office at Pittsburgh and had 2,790 applications for western lands the first day. They came from all directions. Some even approached Kentucky up the Cumberland River from French Lick, headed to the cane lands and clover bottoms of the Bluegrass region. James Harrod of Pennsylvania had started building his fort at Harrodsburg in 1774 and returned to it as soon as Lord Dunmore’s War was over. The whole issue of the settling of Kentucky was a confusing and exciting mess. One of the groups establishing a claim in Kentucky was the McAfee brothers, who came early in 1775.
In February the McAfee brothers
—James, Robert, William, and Samuel—and their associates had already gone into Kentucky to clear land and plant crops.

The Cherokee claim to much of the Kentucky country was marginal at best. Like other tribes, they had roved everywhere on the war path, and they had done some hunting on the edges of the Great Meadow. But most of their hunting was done to the south and east of the Clinch River, south and east of the Tennessee for that matter. After all, the Cherokees had the Great Smoky Mountains to hunt in and the long Blue Ridge chain and the valleys in between, extending from Virginia to Alabama. They had the valleys of the Tennessee, and the Little
Tennessee, the French Broad, the Nolichucky, the Tuckasegee, and the Holston. Or they had had those river valleys, that is, until the white settlers began invading in the 1770s.

Henderson knew the value of precedent and primary claim. Since the royal government had once acknowledged the validity of the Cherokee claim to Kentucky, all he had to do was get a document transferring that right to him and his partners. And once the deed was done, once he had attracted thousands of settlers by selling them parcels of land at bargain prices, who was to get him out of Kentucky? Who would be able to reverse the actions of the Louisa Company? And it seemed of no interest to Henderson that the Indians’ ideas of “owning” land and “selling” land were very different from the whites’.

What Henderson and his partners didn’t foresee was the American Revolution, which would change the very nature of claims of ownership. In retrospect it seems he should have seen what was coming. His house and property had been burned by Regulators in 1771, and he had adjourned his court in face of the protests. He was possibly depending on the turmoil of the gathering rebellion to distract the colonial governments from resisting his actions in the West.

When Henderson sent out advertisements of “
Proposals for the Encouragement
of settling the Lands purchased by Richard Henderson & Co.” on Christmas Day 1774, Governor Dunmore referred to the Louisa Company as “Richard Henderson and other disorderly persons.” Henderson was accused of placing himself above the law of Virginia. Josiah Martin, the governor of North Carolina, called Henderson’s plans “
contrary to Law and Justice
and so pregnant with ill consequences.” Both governments threatened Henderson and one official asked if Henderson had gone insane. “
Archibald Neilson, deputy auditor
and naval officer of the colony, inquired with quizzical anxiety: ‘Pray, is Dick Henderson out of his head?’”

According to Boone’s conversations with Filson eight years later, Henderson commissioned Boone to perform two main tasks. First, he was to use his acquaintance with the Cherokees to persuade them
to gather at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River in March 1775 to ratify the agreement with Henderson’s Louisa Company. Since Boone knew the Cherokee country better than almost any other white man, was respected among the Indians as a formidable scout and hunter, and was trusted, his job was to give credibility to Henderson among the scattered towns along the Little Tennessee, Oconoluftee, and Tuck-asegee rivers. Henderson knew that people, both Indian and white, trusted Boone and tended to follow his advice and leadership.

It has been said that James Robertson
, a leader in the Watauga settlement, suggested to Boone that the Cherokees, impressed by the example of the great wealth given to the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix by the British, might be willing, for enough money, to sell their claims to the Trans-Allegheny lands. In 1768 the British government had given the Iroquois between twenty thousand and forty thousand pounds in money, rifles, blankets, and other goods, and their assurance that the English would not settle the Iroquois region of central New York, and in return the Six Nations had renounced their claims to Kentucky and the Ohio Valley. The Cherokees hoped to reap a similar windfall for themselves from their slender claims to Kentucky lands. They had already made a profitable deal with James Robertson and the Watauga settlers, leasing land in exchange for money and trade goods, though some younger Cherokee warriors such as Dragging Canoe were not pleased by that arrangement.

The second task of Boone’s assignment was to hack a trail out of the wilderness, through Cumberland Gap, into the promised land along the Kentucky River. There was neither time nor means to build a road wide enough for wagons to travel. But a path adequate for packhorses and riders, clearly marked, would serve. Rivers and creeks would still have to be forded and canebrakes threaded through, but such a road would strengthen the claims to the Kentucky land. Henderson and Boone understood that such a road was a necessary and practical thing. But it was also a psychological and symbolic effort. Whoever opened a road into the wilderness already had a superior
claim on the land. Building a road, establishing access to a region, was, from Roman times, an expression of acquisition, ownership. Emperors were road builders. No one would ever again think of a region as just Indian territory once a road had been opened into it.

Nothing is more telling of the contradictions of Boone’s thought and his life than his role as architect and surveyor of what some would call Boone’s Trace, or later the Wilderness Road, or the Transylvania Trail, or
the Road to the Old Settlements
(in Virginia and North Carolina). If he valued the pristine wilderness of Kentucky, the Edenic beauty, the exhilaration of the solitary hunt, he should have been the last man willing to open a way through which settlers could spill in and ruin his paradise. Following that side of his brain, he should have been concealing the route into Kentucky and telling others it was impossible to get there. But there was the other side of Boone’s mind also. Not only was he a hunter and trapper who loved solitude in the wilderness, he was a sociable man, with close ties to friends and hunting companions. And he was a family man with strong and affectionate bonds with a large extended family. His wife, his siblings, his cousins and nephews and nieces and in-laws looked up to him, depended on him, followed him, and waited for him. It was his duty to provide for them and lead them to a better future.