BY REUBEN GOLD THWAITES Author of "Father Marquette," "The Colonies, 1492-1750," "Down Historic Waterways," "Afloat on the Ohio," etc.; Editor of "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents," "Chronicles of Border Warfare," "Wisconsin Historical Collections," etc. Illustrated   New York D. Appleton & Company 1902 Copyright, 1902 By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Published September, 1902 TO THE MEMORY OF THE LATE LYMAN COPELAND DRAPER, LL.D. WHOSE UNPARALLELED COLLECTION OF MANUSCRIPT MATERIALS

Poets, historians, and orators have for a hundred years sung the praises of Daniel Boone as the typical backwoodsman of the trans-Alleghany region. Despite popular belief, he was not really the founder of Kentucky. Other explorers and hunters had been there long before him; he himself was piloted through Cumberland Gap by John Finley; and his was not even the first permanent settlement in Kentucky, for Harrodsburg preceded it by nearly a year; his services in defense of the West, during nearly a

The grandfather of Daniel Boone—George by name—was born in 1666 at the peaceful little hamlet of Stoak, near the city of Exeter, in Devonshire, England. His father had been a blacksmith; but he himself acquired the weaver's art. In due time George married Mary Maugridge, a young woman three years his junior, and native of the neighboring village of Bradninch, whither he had gone to follow his trade. This worthy couple, professed Quakers, became the parents of nine children, all born in Bradninch

The lofty barrier of the Alleghany Mountains was of itself sufficient to prevent the pioneers of Pennsylvania from wandering far westward. Moreover, the Indians beyond these hills were fiercer than those with whom the Quakers were familiar; their occasional raids to the eastward, through the mountain passes, won for them a reputation which did not incline the border farmers to cultivate their further acquaintance. To the southwest, however, there were few obstacles to the spread of settlement. F

It was many years before Daniel Boone realized his dream of reaching Kentucky. Such an expedition into the far-off wilderness could not be lightly undertaken; its hardships and dangers were innumerable; and the way thither from the forks of the Yadkin was not as easily found, through this perplexing tangle of valleys and mountains, as Finley had supposed. His own route had doubtless been over the Ohio Company's pass from the upper waters of the Potomac to a tributary of the Monongahela. Another

The borderers in the Valley of Virginia and on the western highlands of the Carolinas were largely engaged in raising horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, which grazed at will upon the broad slopes of the eastern foot-hills of the Alleghanies, most of them being in as wild a state as the great roving herds now to be seen upon the semi-arid plains of the far West. Indeed, there are some strong points of resemblance between the life of the frontier herdsman of the middle of the eighteenth century and

When Daniel Boone returned from tidewater Virginia to the Yadkin region is not now known. It is probable that the monotony of hauling tobacco to market at a time when his old neighbors were living in a state of panic palled upon a man who loved excitement and had had a taste of Indian warfare. It has been surmised that he served with the Rowan rangers upon Lyttleton's campaign, alluded to in the previous chapter, and possibly aided in defending Fort Dobbs, or served with Waddell under Montgomery

In the winter of 1768-69 a pedler with horse and wagon wandered into the valley of the upper Yadkin, offering small wares to the settlers' wives. This was thrifty John Finley, former fur-trader and Indian fighter, who, thirteen years before, had, as we have seen, fraternized with Boone in Braddock's ill-fated army on the Monongahela. Finley had, in 1752, in his trade with the Indians, descended the Ohio in a canoe to the site of Louisville, accompanied by three or four voyageurs, and, with some

The reader of this narrative has, of course, already discovered that Daniel Boone was neither the original white explorer of Kentucky nor the first white hunter within its limits. Many others had been there before him. It will be worth our while at this point to take a hasty review of some of the previous expeditions which had made the "dark and bloody ground" known to the world. Probably none of the several Spanish explorations of the sixteenth century along the Mississippi River and through th

While Daniel Boone had been hunting and exploring amid the deep forests and waving greenswards of Kentucky, important events had been taking place in the settlements. The colonists along the Atlantic tidewater had become so crowded that there were no longer any free lands in that region; and settlers' cabins in the western uplands of Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia had so multiplied that now much of the best land there had also been taken up. The far-outlying frontier upon whi

Kentucky had so long been spasmodically occupied and battled over by Shawnese, Iroquois, and Cherokees, that it can not be said that any of them had well-defined rights over its soil. Not until white men appeared anxious to settle there did the tribes begin to assert their respective claims, in the hope of gaining presents at the treaties whereat they were asked to make cessions. The whites, on their part, when negotiating for purchases, were well aware of the shadowy character of these claims;

With the opening of the year 1776 Daniel and Squire Boone were employed for several weeks as hunters or assistants to a party of surveyors sent by the Transylvania Company to the Falls of the Ohio, in the vicinity of which Henderson and his friends had taken up seventy thousand acres of land. They met no Indians and saw plenty of game; but returned to find that the settlers were indignant because of this wholesale preemption by the proprietors of the colony in a neighborhood where it was now fel

We have seen that Kentucky's numerous salt-springs lured wild animals thither in astonishing numbers; but for lack of suitable boiling-kettles the pioneers were at first dependent upon the older settlements for the salt needed in curing their meat. The Indian outbreak now rendered the Wilderness Road an uncertain path, and the Kentuckians were beginning to suffer from lack of salt—a serious deprivation for a people largely dependent upon a diet of game. Late in the year 1777 the Virginia governm

In Daniel Boone's "autobiography," he dismisses his year of absence from Kentucky with few words: "I went into the settlement, and nothing worthy of notice passed for some time." No doubt he hunted in some of his old haunts upon the Yadkin; and there is reason for believing that he made a trip upon business of some character to Charleston, S.C. Meanwhile, his fellow settlers of Kentucky had not been inactive. In February (1779) Clark repossessed himself of Vincennes after one of the most brillia

The preliminary articles of peace between the United States and Great Britain had been signed on the thirtieth of November, 1782; but it was not until the following spring that the news reached Kentucky. The northern tribes had information of the peace quite as early; and discouraged at apparently losing their British allies, who had fed, clothed, armed, and paid them from headquarters in Detroit, for a time suspended their organized raids into Kentucky. This welcome respite caused immigration t

During his early years on the Kanawha, Boone kept a small store at Point Pleasant. Later, he moved to the neighborhood of Charleston, where he was engaged in the usual variety of occupations—piloting immigrants; as deputy surveyor of Kanawha County, surveying lands for settlers and speculators; taking small contracts for victualing the militia, who were frequently called out to protect the country from Indian forays; and in hunting. Some of his expeditions took him to the north of the Ohio, wher

Missouri's sparse population at that time consisted largely of Frenchmen, who had taken easily to the yoke of Spain. For a people of easy-going disposition, theirs was an ideal existence. They led a patriarchal life, with their flocks and herds grazing upon a common pasture, and practised a crude agriculture whose returns were eked out by hunting in the limitless forests hard by. For companionship, the crude log cabins in the little settlements were assembled by the banks of the waterways, and t