Boone: A Biography (7 page)

1751–1755

There has been much speculation about why Squire and Sarah Boone and their family left the peaceful countryside of Oley, Pennsylvania, for the wilder Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and then the even wilder Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. Commentators have described the Boones as a restless family, as “
fiddle-footed
,” with the “
itching foot
.” Certainly it was an age of restlessness, when those who had made the great migration from their ancient roots in Britain or the Continent felt little hesitation in picking up again and moving on. The horizon called and curiosity prodded them to go, and then go again.

Most biographers and students of Daniel Boone have pointed out that Squire grew less and less in harmony with the community of Friends at the Exeter Meeting. As early as 1742, when Daniel was only eight, and Sarah, the oldest of his siblings, married a neighbor named John Wilcoxson, who was not a Quaker, both parents were rebuked and confessed their fault. Ironically, the 1730s and 1740s were a time of religious revival in the American colonies, when the movement called the Great Awakening was sweeping over the land. Preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield conducted services in New England where worshipers swooned, had fits, or cringed in terror of hellfire. But it was also a time when parents and churches seemed to be losing control over the young.
More and more young women
had
children out of wedlock. There is a tradition in American humor and folklore that religious revivals also inspire a surge in illegitimate births, as religious fervor seems to stir sexual fever. Such revivals, it was said, “
led to more souls being made
than saved.” After the great revival at Cane Ridge in Kentucky in 1801, it was reported, “
Becca Bell ‘is with child to one Brown’
; Kate Cummins also ‘got careless’ and ‘had a bastard’; Patty McGuire ‘has been whoring.’” The Reverend Charles Woodmason, who traveled into the Carolina backcountry at this time, noted that “
94 percent of the brides
whom he married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day.”

In 1747, the year Daniel was given his first rifle, his older brother Israel also married outside the Quaker community. Again a committee was appointed “
to speak with Squire Boone about his son’s
disorderly marriage.” But this time Squire refused to submit to public humiliation and confess his fault. The investigating committee reported “that he could not see that he had transgressed, and therefore was not willing to condemn it.” It is possible that the spirit of independence in the new land had made him more resistant to the strictures of the Friends. Perhaps he had begun to drift away from the faith itself.

More likely Squire had learned, as many parents do, then and now, how hard it is to direct the affections of their offspring. And because he also liked the mates chosen by his children, Squire may have felt the unfairness of the Friends’ rebuke. His father, George III, had endured the humiliation of public confession. The minutes of the meeting for 1747 show that Squire not only refused to confess his fault but flung arguments back at the Friends, “
giving Room to a reflecting Spirit
even against his friends.” He later sent a heated letter to the committee and in March of 1748 he was expelled from the Exeter Meeting until he would confess his faults and show “
his coming to a Godly Sorrow
in himself.” While Sarah and the children continued to attend the meeting, Squire after that kept the Sabbath by staying at home.

There is reason to believe, based on symbols carved on his tombstone in North Carolina, that Squire, like his son Daniel later, had been
initiated into the society of Freemasons. Leaders such as Benjamin Franklin were known to be enthusiastic Masons. Formed in England early in the eighteenth century, the secret society was devoted to fellowship, ceremony, charity, and service to the community. Joining the Freemasons could have made Squire feel even more independent of the Quaker Meeting.

Freemasonry offered a fresh way of looking at society and mankind—liberal, rational, committed to a useful, moral life, not based on revelation, class, monarchy. Jews and even African Americans and Native Americans might be initiated into lodges. It seems likely the Boones’ affiliation with Masonry strengthened their sense of belonging to the fraternity of all men, whether white or Indian, American or British, and helps explain Daniel’s conduct later in the complex, dangerous time of the American Revolution.

It is likely that his father’s resistance and excommunication from the Quaker Meeting made a deep impression on Daniel. Years later he supposedly told his young friend Peter Houston that
he had never known anything good
to come from religious disputes. All his life Boone avoided religious organizations and sectarian arguments. Though he showed a reverent spirit, treated others with respect and kindness, demonstrated an inner calm, and developed the habit of daily Bible reading, he never belonged to any church nor ever confessed to any established creed.

Like many gifted children, Daniel seems to have inherited the best of both his parents. From his father he appears to have received a boldness and independence, great physical strength and courage, tenacity and leadership, and skill with working metal. Daniel was driven by the same restlessness and curiosity that Squire demonstrated. Both father and son had a way with tools and an ability to lead others. From his mother Daniel may have taken his noted calm and peacefulness, his resistance to panic and anger, his affection for family, forest and countryside, his goodwill and optimism, a trust in others that was sometimes misplaced, and a love of music.

B
ESIDES HIS
disaffection with the Exeter Friends, Squire would have had other reasons to think of leaving Pennsylvania. His sister Sarah Stover and her husband, Jacob, had moved to the south fork of the Shenandoah River in Virginia and sent back letters praising the land and climate of that region. Land there could be gotten very cheaply, and farther south, in the hills of North Carolina, acres could be had for even less. It was the dream of free or cheap land that drove most of the great migrations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. Religious freedom and political freedom were also important, as was escape from debt and indenture. Servants who had finished their terms of indenture on the eastern seaboard usually headed west and south to the cheaper land of the frontier. Those who had served in prison for debt and other causes sought a new start in the recent settlements and land just vacated by Indians. Already a resentment was beginning to build between the great landowning class of the tidewater and lowlands and the poor who sought their own acres in the hill country. Acquiring new land was a thrilling prospect to those whose ancestors had lived under feudal rule for a thousand years, under an order of aristocracy and gentry, with no hope for advancement.

Most of the sunny uplands and fertile meadows of the South were to be had for just getting there with oxen and horses, a few tools and livestock, and a small down payment. All a man needed was a wife, a gun, and two hands to work. Perhaps a dynasty, a great estate, an empire, waited to be wrought into being. Perhaps even fame could be won in a developing country where the failures of the past could be forgotten and the potential, the future, was opening its doors. And underneath that urge to move west was the ancient myth, common to most European cultures, of an earthly paradise, an Eden, a place of the blessed, somewhere over the ocean and over the mountains, where a golden future whispered.
The call of the West was in the blood
and bred in the bone of those who began settling the foothills of the Alleghenies and dreamed of crossing the Alleghenies to find a promised land, a new Canaan in the interior.

Around 1750 Squire Boone moved his whole family away from Oley to the south and west, along the path of the great migrations of that time. Besides Daniel there were seven other unmarried children, ranging from Elizabeth, eighteen, to Hannah, who was only four. With them were Sarah and her husband, John Wilcoxson, and Israel and Samuel and their wives. Henry Miller, the apprentice and Daniel’s best friend, joined the party, as did one of Squire’s nephews.

With the belongings they chose to take—which would have included tools for a blacksmith and gunsmith, weaver and farmer—packed in heavy covered wagons pulled by oxen, they would have gone west on the Allegheny Trail to Harris’s Ferry across the Susquehanna, then turned south, following the line of the Appalachian Mountains by what was called either the Virginia Road or the Great Wagon Road. (Interstate 81 now roughly follows this same route.) The road was already so well traveled that some farmers along the way had set up “stations” to sell grain for livestock, with pens for horses and cattle, hogs and sheep, and rough accommodations and supplies for the travelers.
Farmers at river crossings made extra money
by poling travelers across on ferries. Already stories of bandits and robbers, con men and bushwhackers, were common. It was much safer to travel in a large group.
According to a report made to
the Board of Trade in London in 1751, it was 435 miles from Philadelphia to the Yadkin Valley.

After crossing the Potomac at Williamsport, Maryland, the route followed the Shenandoah River into the Great Valley of Virginia. There is some disagreement about where the family stopped first in Virginia. Descendants later told Lyman Draper that the entourage settled at Linnville Creek just north of Harrisonburg for at least one and perhaps two years. “
William L. Boone told me they tarried
two years on Linville Creek in Virginia, and then in 1752 (perhaps summer or early fall) they moved to the Yadkin River valley,” Nathan Boone told Draper. It is thought the family arrived in Virginia in time to make a crop in the summer of 1750 and again in 1751 before they continued on to North Carolina. Linnville Creek, in Rockingham County, was
near the later home of Squire’s old friend John Lincoln. In 1779 Daniel would lead John’s son, Abraham, grandfather of the president, over the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

More important for sixteen-year-old Daniel, the stop in Virginia gave him the opportunity for his first long hunt, inspired by Indian patterns and habits, an extended foray into the wilderness in quest of fur and game and adventure. At some point after the corn was laid by, Daniel and his friend Henry Miller set out on an expedition that took them hundreds of miles into the wilderness. They first explored the mountains near the Shenandoah all the way to Great Lick, later Roanoke, then dropped south through Roanoke Gap and the chain of the Blue Ridge into the Piedmont backcountry of North Carolina, where the game and furs were still more plentiful.

On this trip Daniel first saw the Yadkin Valley, with its wide rich bottomlands and forests of sycamores, poplars, oak, and hickory. Between its wooded banks, hung with wild grape and peavines, the river curved out of the hills, puckered and scarred by rocks and sunken logs. The pools were filled with catfish, bass, and bream in the lower, slower stretches, and flashed with trout in the upper tributaries. Mink and muskrat, otter and marten, had worn slides in the banks.

William Byrd had explored the region twenty some years before and described it in
A History of the Dividing Line
in 1728. “
The Soil is exceedingly rich
on both sides of the Yadkin, abounding in rank Grass and prodigiously large Trees; and for plenty of Fish, Fowl and Venison, is inferior to No Part of the Northern Continent. There the Traders commonly lie Still for some days to recruit their Horses’ Flesh as well as to recover their own Spirits.” Twenty years before Byrd, John Lawson, the surveyor-general of North Carolina, had visited the Yadkin Valley, called then the Sapona or
Sakona
, and described the beauties of the region, mentioning the soil was as rich as any informed person had seen in the Western world.

Some historians think the name Yadkin
comes from the family name of Atkins. But others suggest it has an Indian source. The Catawbas
apparently called the river Sakona or Sapona, the name of a related Indian nation, but which may also have meant elk. Canebrakes covered long stretches in the flats along the Yadkin, stalks crowded together twelve or fifteen feet high. The American bamboo,
Arundinaria gigantea
, filled much of the Piedmont and Trans-Appalachian valleys. Deer and elk, bears and panthers, wolves and wildcats, hid in the tall shimmering reeds.
The buffalo were mostly gone
, though a few could be spotted from time to time. Their trails could still be seen winding into the hills along the streams into the Cherokee country, the high hunting ranges that seemed to float in blue mystery on the horizon.

Evidence of hunting parties of Catawbas could be seen in the valleys, but no villages were in sight. Daniel and Henry shot all the game they wanted and collected as many hides and furs as they could carry. Pound for pound, beaver skins and mink and otter were worth the most. A packhorse could carry at least two hundred pounds. It was on this first long hunt into the southern wilderness that Daniel saw where his destiny lay. He was at the age when a young man begins to know the shape and direction of his inclination and future, begins to see who he is. If he had doubts before about his calling, the hills and streams of the colony of Carolina (named in 1629 for King Charles I) probably reassured him.