University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER IX

DANIEL BOONE AND WILDERNESS EXPLORATION

THE wandering life of a border Nimrod
in a surpassingly beautiful country teeming
with game was the ideal of the frontiersman
of the eighteenth century. As early as
1728, while running the dividing line between
North Carolina and Virginia, William Byrd
encountered along the North Carolina frontier
the typical figure of the professional hunter:
"a famous Woodsman, call'd Epaphroditus
Bainton. This Forester Spends all his time
in ranging the Woods, and is said to make
great Havock among the Deer, and other Inhabitants

of the Forest, not much wilder than
himself." By the middle of the century, as he
was threading his way through the Carolina
piedmont zone, the hunter's paradise of the
Yadkin and Catawba country, Bishop Spangenberg
found ranging there many hunters, living
like Indians, who killed thousands of deer
each year and sold the skins in the local markets
or to the fur-traders from Virginia
whose heavy pack-trains with their tinkling
bells constantly traversed the course of the
Great Trading Path.

The superlative skill of one of these hunters,
both as woodsman and marksman, was proverbial
along the border. The name of Daniel
Boone became synonymous with expert huntsmanship
and almost uncanny wisdom in forest
lore. The bottoms of the creek near the
Boone home, three miles west of present
Mocksville, contained a heavy growth of beech,
which dropped large quantities of its rich nuts
or mast, greatly relished by bears; and this
creek received its name, Bear Creek, because
Daniel and his father killed in its rich bottoms

ninety-nine bears in a single hunting-season.
After living for a time with his young wife,
Rebecca Bryan, in a cabin in his father's yard,
Daniel built a home of his own upon a tract
of land, purchased from his father on October
12, 1759, and lying on Sugar Tree, a tributary
of Dutchman's Creek. Here he dwelt
for the next five years, with the exception of
the period of his temporary removal to Virginia
during the terrible era of the Indian war.
Most of his time during the autumn and winter,
when he was not engaged in wagoning or
farming, he spent in long hunting-journeys
into the mountains to the west and northwest.
During the hunting-season of 1760 he struck
deeper than ever before into the western mountain
region and encamped in a natural rocky
shelter amidst fine hunting-grounds, in what
is now Washington County in east Tennessee.
Of the scores of inscriptions commemorative
of his hunting-feats, which Boone with pardonable
pride was accustomed throughout his lifetime
to engrave with his hunting-knife upon
trees and rocks, the earliest known is found

ARTHUR DOBBS

Governor of North Carolina

From an old print after the original portrait
by McArdell

HUGH WADDELL

From an etching by Albert Rosenthal after the
original miniature in the possession of
D. C. Waddell, Esq.

upon a leaning beech tree, only recently fallen,
near his camp and the creek which since that
day has borne his name. This is a characteristic
and enduring record in the history of
American exploration:

           

		D. Boon
CillED		A. BAR	On
			Tree
in		The
	yEAR
		1760

Late in the summer of the following year
Boone marched under the command of the
noted Indian-fighter of the border, Colonel
Hugh Waddell, in his campaign against the
Cherokees. From the lips of Waddell, who
was outspoken in his condemnation of Byrd's
futile delays in road-cutting and fort-building,
Boone learned the true secret of success in
Indian warfare, which was lost upon Braddock,
Forbes, and later St. Clair: that the art
of defeating red men was to deal them a sudden
and unexpected blow, before they had time
either to learn the strength of the force employed

against them or to lay with subtle craft
their artful ambuscade.

In the late autumn of 1761, Daniel Boone
and Nathaniel Gist, the son of Washington's
famous guide, who were both serving under
Waddell, temporarily detached themselves
from his command and led a small party on a
"long hunt" in the Valley of the Holston.
While encamping near the site of Black's Fort,
subsequently built, they were violently assailed
by a pack of fierce wolves which they had considerable
difficulty in beating off; and from this
incident the locality became known as Wolf
Hills (now Abingdon, Virginia).[1]

From this time forward Boone's roving instincts
had full sway. For many months each
year he threaded his way through that marvelously
beautiful country of western North
Carolina felicitously described as the Switzerland
of America. Boone's love of solitude
and the murmuring forest was surely inspired
by the phenomenal beauties of the country
through which he roamed at will. Blowing
Rock on one arm of a great horseshoe of mountains

and Tryon Mountain upon the other
arm, overlooked an enormous, primeval bowl,
studded by a thousand emerald-clad eminences.
There was the Pilot Mountain, the towering
and isolated pile which from time immemorial
had served the aborigines as a guide in their
forest wanderings; there was the dizzy height
of the Roan on the border; there was Mt.
Mitchell, portentous in its grandeur, the tallest
peak on the continent east of the Rockies; and
there was the Grandfather, the oldest mountain
on earth according to geologists, of which
it has been written:

What more gratifying to the eye of the wanderer
than the luxuriant vegetation and lavish

profusion of the gorgeous flowers upon the
mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rose-bay,
and laurel, and the azalea rising like
flame; or the rare beauties of the water—the
cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap
into the gorge, and that romantic river poetically
celebrated in the lines:

The long rambling excursions which Boone
made through western North Carolina and
eastern Tennessee enabled him to explore
every nook and corner of the rugged and beautiful
mountain region. Among the companions

and contemporaries with whom he hunted
and explored the country were his little son
James and his brother Jesse; the Linville who
gave the name to the beautiful falls; Julius
Cæsar Dugger, whose rock house stood near
the head of Elk Creek; and Nathaniel Gist,
who described for him the lofty gateway to
Kentucky, through which Christopher Gist
had passed in 1751. Boone had already heard
of this gateway, from Findlay, and it was one
of the secret and cherished ambitions of his
life to scale the mountain wall of the Appalachians
and to reach that high portal of the
Cumberland which beckoned to the mysterious
new Eden beyond. Although hunting was an
endless delight to Boone he was haunted in the
midst of this pleasure, as was Kipling's Explorer,
by the lure of the undiscovered:

Of Boone's preliminary explorations for the
land company known as Richard Henderson
and Company, an account has already been
given; and the delay in following them up
has been touched on and in part explained.
Meanwhile Boone transferred his efforts for
a time to another field. Toward the close
of the summer of 1765 a party consisting
of Major John Field, William Hill, one
Slaughter, and two others, all from Culpeper
County, Virginia, visited Boone and induced
him to accompany them on the "long Journey"
to Florida, whither they were attracted by the
liberal offer of Colonel James Grant, governor
of the eastern section, the Florida of to-day.
On this long and arduous expedition they suffered
many hardships and endured many privations,
found little game, and on one occasion
narrowly escaped starvation. They explored
Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola;
and Boone, who relished fresh scenes and
a new environment, purchased a house and lot

in Pensacola in anticipation of removal thither.
But upon his return home, finding his wife unwilling
to go, Boone once more turned his
eager eye toward the West, that mysterious
and alluring region beyond the great range,
the fabled paradise of Kentucky.

The following year four young men from
the Yadkin, Benjamin Cutbird, John Stewart
(Boone's brother-in-law who afterwards accompanied
him to Kentucky), John Baker,
and James Ward made a remarkable journey
to the westward, crossing the Appalachian
mountain chain over some unknown route, and
finally reaching the Mississippi. The significance
of the journey, in its bearing upon westward
expansion, inheres in the fact that while
for more than half a century the English traders
from South Carolina had been winning
their way to the Mississippi along the lower
routes and Indian trails, this was the first party
from either of the Carolinas, as far as is known,
that ever reached the Mississippi by crossing
the great mountain barrier. When Cutbird,
a superb woodsman and veritable Leatherstocking,

narrated to Boone the story of his
adventures, it only confirmed Boone in his
determination to find the passage through the
mountain chain leading to the Mesopotamia of
Kentucky.

Such an enterprise was attended by terrible
dangers. During 1766 and 1767 the steady
encroachments of the white settlers upon the
ancestral domain which the Indians reserved
for their imperial hunting-preserve aroused bitter
feelings of resentment among the red men.
Bloody reprisal was often the sequel to such
encroachment. The vast region of Tennessee
and the trans-Alleghany was a twilight zone,
through which the savages roamed at will.
From time to time war parties of northern Indians,
the inveterate foes of the Cherokees,
scouted through this no-man's land and even
penetrated into the western region of North
Carolina, committing murders and depredations
upon the Cherokees and the whites indiscriminately.
During the summer of 1766,
while Boone's friend and close connection,
Captain William Linville, his son John, and

another young man, named John Williams,
were in camp some ten miles below Linville
Falls, they were unexpectedly fired upon by
a hostile band of Northern Indians, and
before they had time to fire a shot, a second
volley killed both the Linvilles and severely
wounded Williams, who after extraordinary
sufferings finally reached the settlements.[2]
In May, 1767, four traders and a half-breed
child of one of them were killed in the Cherokee
country. In the summer of this year Governor
William Tryon of North Carolina laid
out the boundary line of the Cherokees, and
upon his return issued a proclamation forbidding
any purchase of land from the Indians
and any issuance of grants for land within
one mile of the boundary line. Despite this
wise precaution, seven North Carolina hunters
who during the following September had lawlessly
ventured into the mountain region some
sixty miles beyond the boundary were fired
upon, and several of them killed, by the resentful
Cherokees.[3]

Undismayed by these signs of impending

danger, undeterred even by the tragic fate of
the Linvilles, Daniel Boone, with the determination
of the indomitable pioneer, never
dreamed of relinquishing his long-cherished design.
Discouraged by the steady disappearance
of game under the ruthless attack of innumerable
hunters, Boone continued to direct
his thoughts toward the project of exploring
the fair region of Kentucky. The adventurous
William Hill, to whom Boone communicated
his purpose, readily consented to go with
him; and in the autumn of 1767 Boone and
Hill, accompanied, it is believed, by Squire
Boone, Daniel's brother, set forth upon their
almost inconceivably hazardous expedition.
They crossed the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies,
the Holston and Clinch rivers near
their sources, and finally reached the head
waters of the West Fork of the Big Sandy.
Surmising from its course that this stream
must flow into the Ohio, they pushed on a
hundred miles to the westward and finally, by
following a buffalo path, reached a salt-spring
in what is now Floyd County, in the extreme
eastern section of Kentucky. Here Boone beheld
great droves of buffalo that visited the
salt-spring to drink the water or lick the brackish
soil. After spending the winter in hunting
and trapping, the Boones and Hill, discouraged
by the forbidding aspect of the hilly country
which with its dense growth of laurel was exceedingly
difficult to penetrate, abandoned all
hope of finding Kentucky by this route and
wended their arduous way back to the Yadkin.

The account of Boone's subsequent accomplishment
of his purpose must be postponed
to the next chapter.