Daniel Boone

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CHAPTER I A Backward Glance

In a sheer Southern mountain pass, known as Cumberland Gap, there stands a monument in honor of a man who cut a road.

Many countries have had important highways. Some have been wide and firm to please ambitious kings. Others, rough and winding up and down the land, have been worn by beasts of burden, by soldiers, or similar messengers of government or trade. Our American roadway was a mere trail, blazed through thicket and timber, and the roadmaker was a backwoodsman.

He was born in the early days of America, when our great land was largely wilderness, with white men living only in the lowlands east of the Alleghany Mountains, where they themselves or their fathers had settled after the long crossing from the Old World. Beyond the mountains, as far as the Pacific Ocean, lay forests, plains, and wastes, unknown and uninhabited save by wild creatures and hostile Indians. As the young country grew in power and population, the English colonists needed this virgin land, and it became some one's duty to blaze a trail through this trackless region westward over which settlers might make their way.

As it happened, a gaunt, blue-eyed, determined man, then living in North Carolina, Daniel Boone by name, had spent many years hunting, fighting, and learning the ways of Indians and woodland beasts, and when the time came to cleave a way through this western wilderness, he was able and ready to do it. He laid his plans, gathered together his volunteers, and in the spring of the year disappeared in the forest ; and, after chopping and burning his way for two hundred miles through land now lying in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky, he emerged in the present Blue Grass region, the paradise of game and the fertile land for which the settlers longed. The fame of his achievement spread far and near, and in his footsteps followed thousands of men, women, and children, seeking homes in this wonderful new country. Along his trail a young nation took its way.

In 1775, Daniel Boone left behind him in the wilderness this narrow track winding from east to west. For twenty years emigrants traversed

A BACKWARD GLANCE 3

it on foot or on horseback and it remained little more than a bridle-path. Then, by order of the legislature, Kentucky's part was widened for wagon travel, although its ledges, sloughs, and forest dangers were hardly lessened. Later, when more favorable courses to the west were opened, portions of the trail fell into disuse, and brush and trees overgrew them and once more claimed them for the forest. Yet neither wilderness nor time could obliterate the memory of Daniel Boone's Road.

When Boone and his handful of road-makers came down from the mountains and passed through Cumberland Gap, it was a wild notch five hundred feet deep, well timbered with hard woods and abounding in game. To-day it is still an impressive cleft through the hills, but no longer untamed country. On a certain June day, in 191 5, a thousand people of the vicinity and from a greater distance gathered there to dedicate a monument to the picturesque pioneer who, quite unconscious that he was cutting one of the historic roadways of the world, had rested in that Gap almost a century and a half before.

In a way the celebration was a double one. For some years the Daughters of the American Revolution, with the help of descendants of pioneers, of old inhabitants, of historians and government maps, had been ferreting out the lost course of the trail, and had succeeded in tracing it and in marking its entire length from Boone's home on the Yadkin River in the Old North State to Boonesborough in Kentucky, where the road ended and the building of the West began. The monument in Cumberland Gap was the last marker of the long series of markers that were placed, and celebrated the completion of the patriotic task as well as the heroism of the great backwoodsman and his associates.

The memorial stands upon a slight eminence. It is a simple structure built of stone and has four faces, each bearing a bronze tablet and each symbolizing one of the four states through which the trail wound. There at Cumberland Gap three of these states meet — Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia — and from the pinnacle, towering above the Gap, the other, North Carolina, may be seen beyond the range. With fitting ceremony the monument was unveiled and presented to the Commonwealth of Kentucky, received in the name of the governor, and dedicated with many glowing tributes to bravery, sacrifice, and hardy manhood. Thus in stone and tablet have Americans remembered Daniel Boone and his Wilderness Road.

After the applause had died away and the guests

A BACKWARD GLANCE 5

had enjoyed lavish Southern hospitality, the celebration came to an end, and merrily on foot and horseback, by carriage and by automobile, the people took their way home. The monument was left alone in the stillness of the Gap to be caressed by sun and wind.

Like an embodied spirit it stands there, telling briefly its own noble story. Yet the whole story of the red-blood life of a man like Daniel Boone is a long one because he served his country in thrilling days and because he was very human and lovable.

CHAPTER II Pennsylvania Pioneers

Daniel Boone may have inherited his spirit of adventure. His grandfather, George Boone, was a weaver, in a humble way, of Bradnich, near Exeter, England, where he was a member of the Society of Friends. The Quakers, or Friends, suffered many persecutions on account of their religion, and William Penn, one of their number, dreamed of a refuge for them in the New World.

In 1682, on an October day bright with autumn color, he sailed up the Delaware River in the little English bark Welcome, and took possession of a grant of land made him by King Charles II, where he intended "to lay the foundation of a free colony for all mankind" and for the Quakers in particular. In honor of Penn's father, an admiral, this new province was christened Pennsylvania by Charles, but Penn, being a modest man, appealed to the king and offered twenty guineas to the secretary to change it. "Had he appealed to the secretary and bribed the king," wrote one of his biographers facetiously, "he might have had his wish."

PENNSYLVANIA PIONEERS 7

As time wore on, glowing reports of this *'Holy Experiment," as Penn's colony was sometimes called, reached the hamlet near Exeter, and George, his wife, and their seven sons and two daughters weighed these reports seriously. The thought of a Hfe free from persecution and rich in the spoils of a land said to be blossoming like the rose appealed to them. The young son named Squire, especially curious, longed for definite information, and went about picturing this far paradise as best he could. News came all too slowly in those days to suit the impetuosity of youth, and after many family consultations, Squire, then about sixteen years of age, accompanied by his older brother George and his sister Sarah, sailed from England in a small, uncomfortable, emigrant ship to see for himself the possibilities in Pennsylvania. As Squire set forth upon this great adventure, wondering and planning in boyish fashion, he Httle dreamed that his voyage would be recorded in history because of a son, Daniel, to be born to him in America.

We can well imagine the feverish interest of the Boones as they approached Philadelphia and looked upon the crowd wont to gather on the shore whenever white sails were seen. Ships beating up the Delaware River in those days were all-important, as practically everything came to the province by sea. English and Dutch vessels brought news and goods from the Old World and from farther ports, and packets plied regularly between the North and South. There were no railroads, and the fourhorse coaches, rocking along between towns on the eastern coast, were slow and uncertain carriers. So Squire's ship was welcomed with the usual interest, and he himself came on shore, finding there a touch of home in the familiar high-crowned Quaker hat and Quaker dress of gray.

In many ways, as reports had said, times were prosperous, especially for those who lived in towns. The young capital itself, laid out in checker-board regularity according to Penn's own plans, was a substantial little community of comfortable homes where Squire found not only English Quakers but also Welsh, Scotch-Irish, Swedish, Dutch, French, and German colonists living free from Old World oppression.

Now and then he saw gayly clad Indians stealing silently along the streets, and from the wharves he watched ships from far parts of the world, parts even as distant as Surinam and the French division of Hispaniola. Trade kept laborers and merchants alert and busy, and made it possible for well-to-do housewives to procure furnishings and table delicacies so fine that even worthies mentioned them in their diaries.

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"A most sinful feast!" one of these some years later said of a Philadelphia dinner. '' Everything which could dehght the eye or allure the taste; curds and creams, jellies, sweetmeats of various kinds, twenty sorts of tarts, fools, trifles, floating islands, whipped sillabubs, almonds, pears and

peaches."

A visiting French prince remembered a certain tea party with equal pleasure. ''The house is small, but well ordered and neat," he wrote ; ''the doors and tables of superb, well-poHshed mahogany ; the locks and andirons of poHshed brass. ... I took some of the excellent tea and would have taken more I think, if the Ambassador had not kindly warned me at the twelfth cup that I must put my spoon across my cup when I wished to bring this warm water question to an end."

In spite of its busy and prosperous air, however, Philadelphia was Httle more than a village, with the frontier of the great western wilderness distant only a few miles from its outlying fields and orchards. There, in the border settlements, life was far different. Houses were rude, unhewn log cabins, erected in clearings and bounded by dense woodland full of sharp, wild eyes spying upon human intruders. House furnishings and clothing were equally crude, creature comforts few, and, lO DANIEL BOONE

had it not been for the great fireplace built in one end of each cabin, and for the iron pot, hanging from the crane and puffing forth savory odors, these cabins would have seemed little like homes. Even tea and coffee were practically unknown on the frontier or were regarded as ''slops which did not stick by the ribs." One pioneer, born on the border, recorded his earliest recollections of a teacup and saucer and of coffee. While traveling as a boy, he spent a night at an inn.

''When supper came on," he says, "a little cup stood in a bigger one with some brownish-looking stuff in it, which was neither milk, hominy nor broth. What to do with these little cups and the spoon belonging to them I could not tell, and I was afraid to ask. ... I therefore watched attentively to see what the big folks would do with their little cups and spoons. I imitated them, and found the taste of the coffee disagreeable beyond anything I ever had tasted in my life. I continued to drink as the rest of the company did, with the tears streaming from my eyes, but when it was to end I was at a loss to know, as the little cups were filled immediately after being emptied. This circumstance distressed me very much, as I durst not say I had had enough. Looking attentively at the grown persons, I saw one man turn his little cup

PENNSYLVANIA PIONEERS ii

bottom upwards and put his little spoon across it. I observed that after this his cup was not filled again. I followed his example, and to my great satisfaction, the result as to my cup was the same." Squire had never known luxuries, and boylike preferred the wilds about Philadelphia, where he roamed at will, while Sarah Boone met and married a German. Squire's brother George, confident in the future, returned to England to report to his parents, and, when all could be made ready, to pilot them and the other children across the sea. The elder Boones bravely dismantled their home, bade farewell to old associations, and in October, 1 7 17, after a journey of two months, a courageous journey and perhaps a sad one, they all landed in Philadelphia.

The Boones lingered there only a short time. As they preferred the country, they became a frontier family at once, welcoming the hardships of border life. After brief stays in Abingdon and North Wales, they settled on the edge of the wood in Qley Township, in the beautiful valley of the Schuylkill River, where the elder George Boone lived out his days.

Squire, meanwhile, after his explorations, had chosen to become a backwoodsman in North Wales, a hamlet of Welsh Quakers. The young men welcorned this ''man of rather small stature, fair complexion, and gray eyes," introduced him to their families, and made him feel at home ; and in time he fell in love with a certain Sarah Morgan, "a woman something over the common size, strong and active, with black hair and eyes, and raised in the Quaker order." According to Quaker usage, they probably announced that "with Divine permission and Friends' approbation they intended to marry each other," and after it was decided that the young people were "at liberty to accomplish their marriage," they were made man and wife on July 23, 1720, in the little Quaker meetinghouse of Gwynedd Township. Friends and relatives feted them after the fashion of Quaker merrymaking — custom permitting the marriage day to "be characterized by cheerful enjoyment provided that those concerned do not pass the boundary line of Christian simplicity and prudence" — and then they settled down as poor but thrifty "borderers" in a mere cabin, small and rough and bare, and built probably on rented land. Fortunately, "doors and windows of superb mahogany" and "twenty sorts of tarts " were not necessary to contentment.

Early in the morning the border people rose. No eight-hour day was theirs ; their work lasted from sunrise to sunset, day in and day out, alike in good

PENNSYLVANIA PIONEERS 13

times and bad. After the cows had been milked and sent to pasture, and after breakfast had been eaten and the daily chores done, the men farmed, hunted, or pursued a trade in a small way. The women cooked and minded the dairy ; mended, spun and wove; made clothes and moccasins; weeded and hoed in the vegetable patch, and all the day had an eye to the children who were quite as lively and mischievous in those times as now. As we look back upon this border life, so wild and fresh, it appears rather pleasant. We forget the days of rain and snow, of tired bodies and aching backs, of illness, of poverty and discouragement. A hard and weary life it was in reality, a life to develop heroes.

Twelve years or so passed in the Boone cabin in North Wales. With much labor the adjacent land had been cleared, a garden-patch had been made to flourish within the inclosure, a loom had been installed in the cabin as Squire had learned his father's trade, and with much thrift and forbearance a tiny sum of money had been laid away for a farm which they hoped some day to purchase. No longer were Squire and Sarah alone, for four children brightened the little cabin and kept their mother busy supplying clothing for small, active bodies and food for good appetites.

About this time they decided to move from North Wales to Oley Township, in the Berks County of to-day, where, with their savings, they were able to buy two hundred and fifty acres of land, situated on a creek and lying about eight miles from the present city of Reading. Grandfather Boone, as well as other members of the family, lived not far away, and there is little doubt but that Friends helped Squire Boone to clear his land and build his log cabin, the kindest welcome to newcomers in a country region.

At last Squire Boone was an independent man, owning his land and his house, which was bare and simple, however, as the Boones were still poor, and life in Oley, as in North Wales, was filled with severity and hardship. Perhaps, as the family sat about the new hearth and heard the wind blowing in their own strange woodland, this second home may have seemed happier than the old one, because of the hard work and self-denial which had made it possible.

Here, in the Pennsylvania wilderness of the Schuylkill Valley, Daniel Boone was born on November 2, 1734. To-day the date of his birth is memorable, yet no one at the time, least of all his parents, dreamed that this boy would make a stir in the world.

CHAPTER HI A Plucky Border Boy

Being a frontier baby and the sixth in the family, little fuss was made over Daniel. He was given border fare and brought up in border ways, and probably left largely to amuse himself and to follow the example of his older brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, records of the first ten years of his life are all too meager, but we know well that a pioneer's cabin was an absorbing place in which to be a boy.

Without doubt Daniel sat on a three-legged stool, and slept in a wooden bunk, and ate at a split-slab table, set with wooden bowls, trenchers, and noggins, with gourds and hard-shelled squashes for extra dishes. China was too expensive and impractical for pioneers. In some households, food was served in a large trencher, or platter, in the center of the table, from which all the family ate; in others, the head of the house served each member.

And how good the food tasted seasoned with woodland appetites ! At breakfast there was johnny-cake and perhaps pone; at dinner, "hog

IS and hominy'' or wild meat and vegetables ; at supper, milk and mush.

The cooking was done in the j&replace. The great fire there, furnishing heat and ventilation, was never expected to go out. If it did, some one had to go to a neighbor to *' borrow fire," a shovel of coals or a burning brand, or had to strike a spark with flint and steel and catch it on a bit of rag or tow, as matches were unknown. The fire kept up a merry blaze, which at night flickered on Squire Boone's hunting arms and garments and on the clothes of the family hanging from wooden pegs around the walls. An early historian says that such open wardrobes ''announced to the stranger as well as to the neighbor the wealth or poverty of a family in their articles of clothing."

Mrs. Boone stepped briskly about the cabin, busy at her many tasks. In summer she probably went barefooted, but in cold weather moccasins were worn. The usual dress of border women consisted of a petticoat and bed gown, a kind of dressing sack, made of linsey, a warm, substantial cloth of flax and wool ; a kerchief neatly crossed about the neck, and a sunbonnet of linen.

The men's attire was patterned somewhat after Indian fashion — a long hunting-shirt of Hnsey, coarse linen, or of dressed deerskins; trousers and leggings of cloth or skin, and deerskin moccasins. The latter were Httle protection in cold or wet weather, when ''wearing them," it was said, "was only a decent way of going barefooted." The belt, which was always tied behind, answered several purposes besides that of holding clothing together. In winter the mittens and sometimes the bullet-pouch occupied the front part of it. At the right side was hung the tomahawk and to the left the scalping knife in a leather sheath. In the bosom of his shirt a hunter stowed his luncheon of bread, cake, and jerk,^ as well as tow for wiping the rifle barrel. Without doubt Daniel longed for the day to come when he, too, might be a hunter and go forth clad like his father.

But Squire Boone hunted only from necessity. He attended to his small farm, kept several looms busy weaving "homespun," and now and then made the welkin ring with the clink of anvil and hammer, for he had become a blacksmith also. In odd moments he mended and tinkered about the place, filled his pov/derhorn, and cleaned and poHshed his rifle, tasks which Daniel must have longed to do himself, if the saying is true that "childhood shows the man as morning shows the day."

1 Smoked meat dried in the sun and cut into long slices or strips.

In pioneer times each family was obliged to do everything for themselves as well as they could. They were their own carpenters, tailors, tanners, cobblers, weavers, servants, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. So Daniel at an early age began to do his small share of a backwoodsman's work. He was taught to build a fire on the hearth with a huge ''back log" and a "fore stick," and to save the ashes for soft soap which every housewife made. He helped in the "truck patch" to raise corn, pumpkins, squashes, beans, and potatoes, which in the late summer and autumn were cooked with pork, venison, and bear meat. He learned the knack of grinding Indian corn for johnny-cake and mush, and of pounding grain into meal. He learned that firewood was generally cut in the early part of the winter and that by the first of April it should be hauled, chopped, and piled. Yet best of all were the lessons taught in the woods where he became familiar with trees, birds, and animals, and was shown how to set traps, to follow trails, and, above all, to conceal his own.

Surely this more or less serious work was tempered with much mischief. Very likely Daniel often wandered too far into the woods and came home late to supper, or slipped away to go fishing and fell into the creek, much to his own shame and his mother's dismay. With the other children he may have made the httle cabin ring with merriment as the family sat at evening in the candle-light, Mrs. Boone making and mending garments, while Squire Boone deftly patched their moccasins with deerskin thongs. Whatever may have happened in his earliest years, we know that Daniel was a bright, healthy boy, and that it was his good fortune to have been born in poverty with the great out-of-doors as his playground. The surroundings and the playthings of his infancy and youth were the ones to fit him for his life work.

When Daniel was ten years old, it was the custom, as it is to-day in certain country regions, to turn out the cows to pasture when spring was in the air and to let them remain until the late autumn. Accordingly, when the season came, Squire Boone's cows were driven from the homestead to a pasture some five miles distant, and with them went Daniel and his mother. All eagerly the barefooted, freckled urchin drove the cows down the lane and out into the road. None too soon could he get to the pasture and begin the long summer quite alone, save for his mother, with the herd and the wild creatures of the fields and woods. Mrs. Boone may have found less pleasure than Daniel in the annual departure, leaving behind her, as she did, her husband and her other children. We know, however, that she was very devoted to Daniel, one historian referring to him as her ''favorite son," and probably her days in the pasture with him were a joy.

They lived together in a tiny cabin, near which were a spring and dairy-house where Mrs. Boone busied herself making butter and cheese. It was Daniel's work to tend the cows. During those summer days he was out of bed at sunrise and ready to drive the cattle to pasture after their morning milking. He was expected to follow them hour on hour as they roamed about grazing, keeping with them, or at least within sound of the tinkling bells of their leaders. When late afternoon came, he drove them back again through the woods and clearing, and, after the evening milking, locked them securely in the pens. Such a life out-of-doors, with no work to keep mind and hands occupied, gave him opportunity to see for himself all the wa3^s of nature. He had ample time in which to watch and think and listen — to learn to walk through underbrush and thicket as silently as an Indian, to imitate the notes and calls of birds and animals, to tell the time of day by the sun's position in the sky, to find the points of compass by moss and bark, always thicker on the north side of tree trunks.

to distinguish storm clouds, and predict weather from the wind. In the wide stillness, broken only by the crunch and nibbling of the cattle, the chiming of their bells, and the sounds of nature itself, Daniel became wise in the very knowledge which was to be so necessary to him as a pioneer.

Even when Daniel was so young, his love of hunting was evident. For long hours he lay in hiding, spying upon squirrels, birds, and chipmunks as they went about their secret business. His chief weapon was the root end of a young tree — gnarled, tough, and smoothly poHshed — which he trained himself to throw with exquisite skill. The days of this crude missile were numbered. When Daniel was twelve years old. Squire Boone gave his son a Hght rifle, and with such a possession Daniel, boylike, considered himself a full-fledged hunter. Quite forgetful of his duty as herdboy, he would wander far from the cows, intent only on his gun and the game which it would win for him ; and the cows sometimes strayed too far and were found only after much searching and calHng in the night.

Daniel's parents were wise, and instead of punishing their boy for his neglect, they put his abihty to use and commissioned him to supply the meat for their table. Nothing could have made Daniel happier. As each summer passed and the cows were driven back to the homestead, Daniel began a long winter of hunting. Over mountains, along valleys, across streams, he roved as pleased him best in ail kinds of wind and weather, learning secrets in the snow which nature could not teach him in summer. The game which he killed he cured for the family, and the skins he carried to Philadelphia, some fifty miles east of Oley, where he saw a bit of the world — as his father had when a boy — and there sold them for hunting supplies. When he was not busy either as herdboy or hunter, he turned blacksmith. Yet in iron work, as in all else, his instinct for hunting revealed itself. His chief skill lay in the making and mending of guns and traps.

In those frontier days, boys and girls received little training from school-teachers. When they did attend school they sat upon wooden benches in a little log hut, and had lessons in the spellingbook and Psalter, and in writing and arithmetic. As far as we know, Daniel received no regular schooling, although some historians say that he attended a 'Afield" school taught by an Irishman for whom he had little respect and upon whom he played various unusual pranks. He gained his first knowledge of nature from his father, as he followed him about the farm or went with him into the woods, increasing this knowledge later on by his wanderings alone. In the dusk of summer evenings in the pasture, as Daniel and his mother sat together, doubtless he reported his adventures and discoveries of the day, and Mrs. Boone, being an intelligent woman, discussed them with him. Very likely from these simple stories of nature she taught Daniel the great principles of human life as only a mother can.

When Daniel was fourteen years old, his brother Samuel married Sarah Day, a Quakeress of more than ordinary attainments, and, being interested in her young brother-in-law, she taught him to read, write, and cipher. To her and to his mother Daniel owed his early education. With their training, *'he could read understandingly, do rough surveying, keep notes of his work, and write a sensible though badly-spelled letter."

Nowadays girls and boys of fourteen are usually ready to graduate from the grammar school. How different it was with Daniel ! Of book knowledge he had had only the first lessons. Yet he could trap the bear and beaver ; he could bring down the wild cat and the panther. The secrets of green things and of all creatures living in the countryside through which he roamed were plain to him, and he knew also the best use of the loom, the anvil, and the hammer.

Frequently during these years of growing up, Daniel saw Indians. The red men of Pennsylvania often came to the border settlements and even went into the towns, and their errands were always friendly. William Penn had pledged them his faith when he came to their country, and they in turn had promised to "live in love with him and his children as long as the moon and the sun shall endure." Those simple words, uttered under a wide-spreading elm near Philadelphia, remained words of unbroken faith as long as the Quakers held control in the province. Daniel used to catch glimpses of them now and then, as they stole out of the woods and along the roads to trade or purchase supplies. He watched their quick manner, their sharp eyes, their impassive faces. When their business was over, he saw them return and disappear among the trees as silently as they had come, and it is no wonder that to him they were strange and fascinating men. Certain of them became converted to Christianity by a Moravian missionary, and held a meeting in Squire Boone's barn. A wonderful gathering it must have seemed to Daniel — the savages in their picturesque costumes, the missionary from far-away, and the Quaker neighbors, all joining in the simple service.