Transcriber's Note: The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

RED RIVER CARTS FROM PEMBINA.

THE WAY TO THE WEST
AND THE LIVES
OF THREE EARLY AMERICANS
BOONE—CROCKETT—CARSON
BY
EMERSON HOUGH
AUTHOR OF
THE COVERED WAGON, Etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
FREDERIC REMINGTON

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS—NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1903
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
October

TO
J. B. H.

CONTENTS

1834

IN THE YEAR 1834 IT BECAME NO LONGER
PROFITABLE TO TRAP THE BEAVER

PREFACE

The customary method in writing history is to rely on chronological sequence as the only connecting thread in the narrative. For this reason many books of history are but little more than loosely bound masses of dates and events that bear no philosophical connection with one another, and therefore are not easily retained in the grasp of the average mind. History, to be of service, must be remembered.

A merely circumstantial mind may grasp and retain for a time a series of disconnected dates and events, but such facts do not appeal to that more common yet not less able type of intellect that asks not only when, but why, such and such a thing happened; that instinctively relates a given event to some other event, and thus goes on to a certain solidity and permanency in conclusions. Perhaps to this latter type of mind there may be appeal in a series of loosely connected yet really interlocking monographs upon certain phases of the splendid and stirring history of the settlement of the American West.

Not concerned so much with a sequence of dates, or with a story of martial or political triumphs, so called, the writer has sought to show somewhat of the genesis of the Western man; that is to say, the American man; for the history of America is but a history of the West.

Whence came this Western man, why came he, in what fashion, under what limitations? What are the reasons for the American or Western type? Is that type permanent? Have we actual cause for self-congratulation at the present stage of our national development? These are some of the questions that present themselves in this series of studies of the manner in which the settlement of the West was brought about.

The history of the occupation of the West is the story of a great pilgrimage. It is the record of a people always outstripping its leaders in wisdom, in energy and in foresight. A slave of politics, the American citizen has none the less always proved himself greater than politics or politicians. The American, the Westerner, if you please, has been a splendid individual. We shall have no hope as a nation when the day of the individual shall be no more. Then ultimately we shall demand Magna Charta over again; shall repeat in parallel the history of France in ’93; shall perhaps see the streets run red in our America. There are those who believe that the day of the individual in America is passing all too swiftly, that we are making history over-fast. There is scant space for speculation when the facts come crowding down so rapidly on us as is the case to-day. Yet there may perhaps be some interest attached to conclusions herein, which appear logical as based upon a study of the manner in which the American country was settled.

As to dates, we shall need but few. Indeed, it will suffice if the reader shall remember but one date out of all given in this book—that when it became no longer profitable to trap the beaver in the West. This date, remembered and understood logically, may prove of considerable service in the study of the movements of the American people.

As to the apparently disconnected nature of the studies here presented, it is matter, as one may again indicate, not of accident. On the contrary, the arrangement of the material is thought to constitute the chief claim of the work for a tolerant consideration.

I shall ask my reader to consider the movements of the American population as grouped under four great epochs. There was a time when the west-bound men were crossing the Alleghanies; a time when they crossed the Mississippi; a time when they crossed the Rocky Mountains. Now they cross the Pacific Ocean. Roughly coincident with these great epochs we may consider, first, the period of down-stream transportation; second, of up-stream transportation; and lastly, of transportation not parallel to the great watercourses, but directly across them on the way to the West. These latter groupings were employed in a series of articles printed in the Century Magazine in the year 1901-1902, the use of this material herein being by courtesy of the Century Company.

I have not hesitated to employ the medium of biography where that seemed the best vehicle for conveying the idea of a great and daring people led by a few great and daring pilots, prophets of adventurings: hence the sketches of the lives of the great frontiersmen, Boone, Crockett, and Carson,—all great and significant lives, whose story is useful in illustrative quality.

I am indebted for many facts obtained from special study by Mr. Horace Kephart, an authority on early Western history, illustrating thoroughly the part that the state of Pennsylvania played in the movement of the early west-bound population. Mr. Warren S. Ely, a resident of historic Bucks County, Pennsylvania, supplements Mr. Kephart’s material with results of local investigations of his own. Mr. Alexander Hynds of Tennessee assists in telling the story of that Frontier Republic whose history blends itself so closely with Western affairs of a hundred years ago. I have quoted freely from Mr. N. P. Langford, a man of the early trans-Missouri, an Argonaut of the Rockies, who has placed at my disposal much valuable material. Mr. Hiram M. Chittenden’s splendid work on the history of the American fur trade has proved of great value.

I am indebted to many books and periodicals for data regarding the modern American industrial development. I am indebted also to many early authors who wrote of the old West, and am under obligations to very many unknown friends, the unnamed but able writers of the daily press.

In regard to the classification of this material, varied and apparently heterogeneous, yet really interdependent, under the four epochs or volume-heads mentioned, I refer to the table given on another page.

As justification of what might be called presumption on the part of the writer in undertaking a work of this nature, he has only to plead a sincere interest in the West, which was his own native land; a love for that free American life now all too rapidly fading away; and a deep admiration for the accomplishments of that American civilization which never was and never will be any better than the man that made it. It has not been the intention herein to write a history of the American people, but a history of the American man.

EMERSON HOUGH.

Chicago, Illinois, June, 1903.

THE WAY TO THE WEST

CHAPTER I
THE AMERICAN AX

I ask you to look at this splendid tool, the American ax, not more an implement of labor than an instrument of civilization. If you can not use it, you are not American. If you do not understand it, you can not understand America.

This tool is so simple and so perfect that it has scarcely seen change in the course of a hundred years. It lacks decoration, as do the tools and the weapons of all strong peoples. It has no fantastic lines, no deviations from simplicity of outline, no ornamentations, no irregularities. It is simple, severe, perfect. Its beauty is the beauty of utility.

In the shaft of the ax there is a curve. This curve is there for a reason, a reason of usefulness. The simple swelling head is made thus not for motives of beauty, but for the purpose of effectiveness. The shaft, an even yard in length, polished, curved, of a formation that shall give the greatest strength to a downright blow in combination with the greatest security to the hand-grasp, has been made thus for a century of American life. This shaft is made of hickory, the sternest of American woods, the one most capable of withstanding the hardest use. It has always been made thus and of this material.

The metal head or blade of the American ax is to-day as it has always been. The makers of axes will tell you that they scarcely know of any other model. The face of the blade is of the most highly tempered steel for a third or half of its extent. The blade or bitt is about eight inches in length, the cutting edge four and seven-eighths to five inches in width. The curve of this edge could not, by the highest science, be made more perfect for the purpose of biting deepest at the least outlay of human strength. The poll or back of the ax is about four inches in width, square or roughly rounded into such form that it is capable of delivering a pounding, crushing or directing blow. The weight of the ax-head is about four pounds, that is to say from three and one-half to five pounds.

With the ax one can do many things. With it the early American blazed his way through the trackless forests. With it he felled the wood whereby was fed the home fire, or the blaze by which he kept his distant and solitary bivouac. With it he built his home, framing a fortress capable of withstanding all the weaponry of his time. With it he not only made the walls, but fabricated the floors and roof for his little castle. He built chairs, tables, beds, therewith. By its means he hewed out his homestead from the heart of the primeval forest, and fenced it round about. Without it he had been lost.

At times it served him not only as tool, but as weapon; nor did more terrible weapon ever fit the hand of man. Against its downright blow wielded by a sinewy arm the steel casques of the Crusaders had proved indeed poor fending. Even the early womankind of America had acquaintance with this weapon. There is record of a woman of early Kentucky who with an ax once despatched five Indians, who assailed the cabin where for the time she had been left alone.

It was a tremendous thing, this ax of the early American. It cleared away paths over hundreds of miles, or marked the portages between the heads of the Western waterways, which the early government declared should be held as public pathways forever. In time it became an agent of desolation and destruction, as well as an agent of upbuilding and construction. Misguided, it leveled all too soon and wastefully the magnificent forests of this country, whose superior was never seen on any portion of the earth. Stern, simple, severe, tremendous, wasteful—truly this was the typical American implement.

CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN RIFLE

Witness this sweet ancient weapon of our fathers, the American rifle, maker of states, empire builder. Useful as its cousin, the ax, it is in design simple as the ax; in outline severe, practicable, purposeful in every regard. It is devoid of ornamentation. The brass that binds the foot of the stock is there to protect the wood. The metal guard below the lock is to preserve from injury the light set-triggers. The serrated edges of the lock plate may show rude file marks of a certain pattern, but they are done more in careless strength than in cunning or in delicacy. This is no belonging of a weak or savage man. It is the weapon of the Anglo-Saxon; that is to say, the Anglo-Saxon in America, who invented it because he had need for it.

This arm was born of the conditions that surrounded our forefathers in the densely covered slopes of the Appalachian Divide, in whose virgin forests there was for the most part small opportunity for extended vision, hence little necessity for a weapon of long range. The game or the enemy with which the early frontiersman was concerned was apt to be met at distances of not more than a hundred or two hundred yards, and the early rifle was perfect for such ranges.

Moreover, it was only with great difficulty that the frontiersman transported any weighty articles on his Western pilgrimage. Lead was heavy, powder was precious, the paths back to the land of such commodities long and arduous. A marvel of adaptation, the American rifle swiftly grew to a practical perfection. Never in the history of the arms of nations has there been produced a weapon whose results have been more tremendous in comparison to the visible expenditure of energy; never has there been a more economical engine, or an environment where economy was more imperative.

The ball of the American rifle was small, forty, sixty or perhaps one hundred of them weighing scarcely more than a pound. The little, curving horn, filled with the precious powder grains, carried enough to furnish many shots. The stock of the rifle itself gave housing to the little squares of linen or fine leather with which the bullet was patched in loading. With this tiny store of powder and lead, easily portable food for this providentially contrived weapon, the American frontiersman passed on silently through the forest, a master, an arbiter, ruler of savage beast or savage foeman, and in time master of the civilized antagonist that said him nay.

We shall observe that the state of Pennsylvania was the starting point of the westward movement of our frontiersmen. We shall find also that the first American small-bore, muzzle-loading rifles were made in Pennsylvania. The principle of the rifle, the twist in the bore, is thought to have originated in the German states of the Palatinate, but it was left for America to improve it and to perfect its use.

At Lancaster, Pennsylvania, there was a riflemaker, probably a German by birth, by name Decherd or Dechert, who began to outline the type of the American squirrel-rifle or hunting-arm. This man had an apprentice, one Mills, with ideas of his own. We see this apprentice and his improved rifle presently in North Carolina; and soon thereafter riflemakers spring up all over the east slope of the Alleghanies, so that as though by magic all our hunters and frontiersmen are equipped with this long rifle, shooting the tiny ball, and shooting it with an accuracy hitherto deemed impossible in the achievements of firearms.

Withal we may call this a Southern arm, since New England was later in taking up its use, clinging to the Queen Anne musket when the men of North Carolina and Virginia scorned to shoot a squirrel anywhere except in the head. The first riflemen of the Revolutionary War were Pennsylvanians, Virginians and Marylanders, all Southerners; and deadly enough was their skill with what the English officers called their “cursed widow and orphan makers.”

The barrel of the typical rifle of those days was about four feet in length, the stock slender, short and strongly curved, so that the sights came easily and directly up to the level of the eye in aiming. The sights were low and close to the barrel, some pieces being provided with two hind sights, a foot or so apart, so that the marksman might not draw either too fine or too coarse a bead with the low silver or bone crescent of the fore sight. Usually the rear sight was a simple, flat bar, finely notched, and placed a foot or fifteen inches in front of the breech of the barrel, so that the eye should focus easily and sharply at the notch of the rear sight. Such was the care with which the sights were adjusted that the rifleman sometimes put the finishing touches on the notch with so soft a cutting tool as a common pin, working away patiently, a little at a time, lest he should by too great haste go too deep into the rear sight, and so cause the piece to shoot otherwise than “true.”

The delicately arranged set-triggers made possible an instantaneous discharge without any appreciable disturbance of the aim when once obtained; and the long distance between the hind sight and fore sight, the steadiness of the piece, owing to its length and weight, the closeness of the line of sight to the line of the trajectory of a ball driven with a relatively heavy powder charge, all conspired to render extreme accuracy possible with this arm, and this accuracy became so general throughout the American frontier that to be a poor rifle shot was to be an object of contempt.

Each rifle was provided with its own bullet mold, which cast a round ball of such size that when properly “patched” it fitted the bore of the piece tightly, so tightly that in some cases a “starter” or section of false barrel was used, into which the ball was forced, sometimes being swaged in with a mallet and a short starting rod. The ramrod proper was carried in pipes attached to the long wooden stock, which extended to the muzzle of the barrel underneath the piece. One end of this rod was protected with a brass ferrule, and the other was provided with a screw, into which was twisted the “worm” used in cleaning the arm.

The pouch of the hunter always carried some flax or tow for use in cleaning the piece. The rifleman would wind a wisp of this tow about the end of the “worm,” moisten it by passing it between his lips, and then pass the tightly fitting wad of tow up and down the barrel until the latter was perfectly free from powder residue. Then the little ball, nicely patched, was forced down on the powder charge by the slender ramrod, made with great care from the toughest straight-grained hickory wood.

Powder and ball were precious in those early days, and though strong men ever love the sports of weapons, waste could not be tolerated even in sport. Sometimes at night the frontiersmen would gather for the pastime of “snuffing the candle,” and he was considered a clumsy rifleman who but fanned the flame with his bullet, or cut too deeply into the base of the candle-wick, and so extinguished the light. Again the riflemen would engage in “driving the nail” with the rifle ball, or would shoot at a tiny spot of black on a board or a blazed tree-trunk, firing a number of balls into the same mark. In nearly all such cases the balls were dug out of the tree or plank into which they had been fired, and were run over again into fresh bullets for use at another time. Thus grew the skill of the American rifleman, with whose weapon most of the feats of latter day short-range marksmanship could be duplicated.[^[1]]

The early American depended upon his rifle in supporting and defending his family. Without it he had not dared to move across the Alleghanies. With it he dared to go anywhere, knowing that it would furnish him food and fending. When the deer and turkey became less numerous near him, he moved his home farther westward, where game was more abundant.

His progress was bitterly contested by the Indian savages all the way cross the American continent, but they perished before this engine of civilization, which served its purpose across the timbered Appalachians, down the watershed to the Mississippi, up the long and winding streams of the western lands, over the Rockies, and down the slopes of the Sierras to the farther sea. Had it never known change it had not been American. An ax is an ax, because a tree is a tree, whether in the Alleghanies or the Rockies; but the rifle met in time different conditions. The great plains furnished larger game animals, and demanded longer range in arms, so that in time the rifle shot a heavier ball.

When the feverish intensity of American life had asked yet more haste, there came the repeating rifle, firing rapidly a number of shots, an invention now used all over the earth. In time there came also the revolving pistol, rapid, destructive, American. These things had not to do with the early west-bound man, this wilderness traveler, himself perforce almost savage, shod with moccasins, wearing the fringed hide tunic that was never in the designs of Providence intended for any unmanly man, and that fits ill to-day the figure of any round-paunched city dweller. Feather or plume he did not wear in his hat, for such things pertained rather to the hired voyager than to the independent home builder. Ornamentation was foreign to his garb and to his weaponry. He had much to do. The way was hard. No matter how he must travel, this long rifle was with him. At his belt, in the little bag of buckskin, were the bullets in their stoppered pouch, the cleaning worm, the extra flint or two, the awl for mending shoon or clothing.

So were equipped the early Americans, gaunt, keen, tireless, that marched to meet the invading forces at the battle of New Orleans; and when the officers of the British army, on the day after that stricken field, found half their dead shot between the eyes, they knew they could lead their troops no more against such weaponry and such weapon bearers. The rifle had won the West, and it would hold it fast.

CHAPTER III
THE AMERICAN BOAT

Here is that fairy ship of the wilderness, the birch-bark canoe, the first craft of America, antedating even the arrival of the white man. It is the ship of risk and of adventure, belonging by right to him who goes far and travels light, who is careless of his home coming. It is a boat that now carries the voyager, and now is carried by him. It is a great-hearted craft. You shall take it upon your shoulders, and carry it a mile across the land trail, without needing to set it down; but when you place it on the water it in turn will carry you and your fellow, and yet another, and your household goods of the wilderness up to five times your weight.

Freakish as a woman, as easily unsettled, yet if you be master it shall take you over combing waves, and down yeasty rapids and against steady current, until finally you shall find yourself utterly apart from the familiar haunts of man, about you only the wilderness, the unadventured. This is the ship of the wilderness, the fairy ship, the ship of heroes. To-day it is passing away. With it goes great store of romance and adventure.

The red man taught the white man how to build and how to use this boat. He taught how to cut the long strips of toughest bark from the birch-tree, prying it off with sharpened pole or driven wooden wedge. He showed how to build the frame of the boat on the ground, or in a long hole dug in the ground, where stakes hold fast the curves of the gunwales, between which are later forced the steamed splints that serve as ribs and as protection for the fragile skin, soaked soft and pliable, which is presently laid on the frame of gunwale and rib and bottom splint. This covering of bark is sewn together with the thread of the forest, fiber of swamp conifers—“wautp,” the Indians of the North call this thread.

Then over the seams is run the melted pitch and resin taken from the woods. The edges of the bark skin are made fast at the gunwales, the sharply bent bows are guarded carefully from cracks where the straining comes, and the narrow thwarts, wide as your three fingers, are lashed in, serving as brace and as all the seat you shall find when weary from kneeling. The fresh bark is clean and sweet upon the new-made ship, the smell of the resin is clean. Each line of the boat is full of spirit and grace and beauty.

The builder turns it over, and where he finds a bubble in the pitching of a seam he bends down and puts his lips to it, sucking in his breath, to find if air comes through. So he tests it, well and thoroughly, mending and patching slowly and carefully, until at last it pleases him throughout. And then he places his new-made ship on the water, where it sits high and light, spinning and turning at its tether, never still for an instant, but shifting like a wild duck under the willows, responsive to the least breath of the passing airs. It is eager to go on. It will go far, in its life of a year or two. If it gets a wound from the rocks, or from the clumsiness of the tyro that drives it upon the beach instead of anchoring it free, then it is easily mended by a strip of bark and some forest pitch. When at last it loses its youth, and cracks or soaks in water so freely that it takes too long to dry it at the noonday pipe-smoking, then it is not so difficult to build another in the forest.

The canoe is as the ax and the rifle, an agent economical, capable of great results in return for small expenditure of energy. It is American. There was much to do, far to go. It was thus because America existed as it did.

No craft has been found easier of propulsion to one knowing the art of the paddle. The voyager makes his paddle about as long as his rifle, up to his chin in length. He paddles with the blade always on one side of the canoe. As the blade is withdrawn from the backward stroke, it is turned slightly in the water, so that the course of the bow is still held straight. If he would approach a landing sidewise with his boat, he makes his paddle describe short half curves, back and forth, and the little boat follows the paddle obediently. The advance of the canoe is light, silent, spirit-like. It is full of mystery, this boat. Yet it is kind to those who know it, as is the wilderness and as are all its creatures.

This is the boat of the northern traveler, the voyager of the upper ways. In the South, where the birch does not grow in proper dimensions, the bark of the elm has on occasion served to make a small craft. In different parts of the North, too, the birch canoe takes different shapes. In the northeast the Abenakis made it long and with little rake, with low bow and stern and with bottom swelling outward safely under the tumble-home,—this stable model serving for the strong streams of the forested regions of the North. Far to the west, where roll the great inland lakes, the Ojibways made their boats higher at bow and stern, wider of beam, shorter, rounder of bottom, all the better fitted for short and choppy waves.

Then, under the white fur traders’ tutelage, there were made great ships of birch-bark, the canot du Nord of the Hudson Bay trade, such as came down with rich burdens of furs when the brigades started down-stream to the markets; or yet the greater canot du maitre once used on the Great Lakes, a craft that needed a dozen to a dozen and a half paddles for its propulsion. Again, at the heads of the far off Northwestern streams there were canoes so small as to carry but a single person, propelled by a pair of sticks, one in each hand of the occupant, the points of these hand-sticks pushing against the bottom of the stream. But ever this ship of the wilderness was so contrived that its crew could drive it by water or carry it by land.

Thus were the portages mastered, thus did the man with small gear to hinder him get out from home, westward into the wilderness. Down stream or up stream, this boat went far. Paddle or sail or shodden pole served for the wanderer before the trails were made, and before the boats of the white settlers followed where the savage red men and scarcely less savage white adventurers had found the way.

There were other boats for the early traveler, and these were employed by those that had crossed the Alleghanies on foot and would fare farther westward. The dugout, made of the sycamore or sassafras log, ten to twenty feet in length, narrow, unstable, thick-skinned and a bit clumsy, was good enough for one pushing on down-stream, or prowling about in sluggish, silent bayous. This was the boat of the South in the early days. Soon the great flat-boat succeeded it for those that traveled with family goods or in large parties. The wooden boats came later, the flat-boat after the dugout, the keel-boat but following the far trail of the birch-bark to the upper ways, or perchance passing, slipping down-stream, the frail hide coracle of the hunter that had ventured unaccompanied far into unknown lands.

Above all things in these early days must compactness and lightness be studied. This American traveler was poor in the goods of this world; his possessions made small bulk. This ax made him bivouac or castle, or helped him make raft or canoe. This rifle gave him food and clothing. He walked westward to the westward flowing streams, and there this light craft, dancing, beckoning, alluring, invited him yet on and on, proffering him carriage for his scanty store, offering obedience to him who was the master of the wilderness, of its alluring secrets and its immeasurable resources.

CHAPTER IV
THE AMERICAN HORSE

Observe here a creature, a dumb brute, that has saved some centuries of time. Indeed, without this American horse, the American civilization perhaps could never have been. Without the ax, the rifle, the boat and the horse there could have been no West.

To-day we would in some measure dispense with the horse, but in the early times no part of man’s possessions was more indispensable. This animal was not then quite as we find him to-day in the older settled portions of the country. In some of our wilder regions we can still see him somewhat as he once was, rough, wiry, hardy, capable of great endeavor, easily supported upon the country over which he passed.

Naturally the early west-bound traveler could not take with him food for his horse, and the latter must be quite independent of grain. Corn, exceedingly difficult to raise, was for the master alone. The horse must live on grass food, and find it where he stopped at night. During the day he must carry the traveler and his weapons, another horse perhaps serving as transportation for food or household goods; or, if there was a family with the traveler, perhaps one horse sufficed for the mother and a child or two. The weak might ride, the strong could trudge alongside. Many women have so traveled out into the West—women as sweet as any of to-day.

We have here, then, one more simple, economical and effective factor in the resources of the early American. Beauty, finish, elegance, were not imperative. Strength, stamina, hardihood, these things must be possessed. The horse must be durable; and so he was. The early settlers on the Atlantic coast brought from over the seas horses of good blood. Virginia was noted as a breeding ground before the yet more famous Blue Grass Region of Kentucky began to produce horses of great quality. The use of the horse in the New World went on as it did in the Old. The French in the North, the English at the mid-continent, the Spanish in the South, all brought over horses; and even to-day the types of the three sections are distinct.

The horse with which we are concerned was the hardy animal, able to find food in the forest glades or laurel thickets of the Appalachians; that served as pack-horse in the hunt near home, as baggage horse in the journey away from home. In those days the horse was rather a luxury than a necessity. All earlier or Eastern America was at short range. The rifle was short in range; the man himself was a footman, and did not travel very far in actual leagues.

For a generation he could walk, or at least travel by boat. But when he came to the edge of the open country of the plains, when he saw above him the vast bow of the great River of the West, across whose arc he needed to travel direct, then there stood waiting for him, as though by providential appointment, this humble creature, this coward, this hero of an animal, now afraid of its own shadow, now willing to face steel and powder-smoke, patient, dauntless, capable of great exertion and great accomplishment. So in the land of great distances the traveler became a mounted man; the horse became part of him, no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

The Spanish contributed most largely to the American holding of that vast indefinite West of ours that they once claimed, when they allowed to straggle northward across the plains, into the hand of Indian or white man, this same lean and wiry horse, carrying to the deserts of America the courage of his far-off Moorish blood, his African adaptability to long journeys on short fare.[^[2]] The man that followed the Ohio and Missouri to the edge of the plains, the trapper, the hunter, the adventurer of the fur trade, had been wholly helpless without the horse. For a time the trading posts might cling to the streams, but there was a call to a vast empire between the streams, where one could not walk, where no boat could go, nor any wheeled vehicle whatever. Here, then, came the horse, the thing needed.

The white adventurer may have brought his horse with him by certain slow generations of advance, or he may have met him as he moved West; at times he captured and tamed him for himself, again he bought him of the Indian, or took him without purchase. Certainly in the great open reaches of the farther West the horse became man’s most valuable property, the unit of all recognized current values. The most serious, the most unforgivable crime was that of horse stealing. To kill a man in war, man to man, was a matter of man and man, and to be regarded at times with philosophy; but to take away without quarrel and by stealth what was most essential to man’s life or welfare was held equivalent to murder unprovoked and of a despicable nature. To be “set afoot” was one of the horrors long preserved in memory by the idiom of Western speech.

The food of this horse, then, was generally what he might gain by forage. In furnishings, his bridle was sometimes a hide lariat, his saddle the buckskin pad of the Indians. Stirrups the half-wild white man sometimes discarded, after the fashion of the Indian, who rode by the clinging of his legs turned back, or by purchase of his toes thrust in between the foreleg and the body of his mount. A fleet horse, one much valued in the chase or in war, might be his master’s pet, tied close to his house of skin at night, or picketed near-by at the lonesome bivouac. He might have braided in his forelock the eagle feather that his white master himself would have disdained to wear as ornament. Of grooming the horse knew nothing, neither did he ever know a day of shelter.

His stable was the heart of a willow thicket if the storm blew fierce. In winter-time his hay was the bark of the cottonwood, under whose gnarled arms the hunter had pitched his winter tepee or built his rough war-house of crooked logs. When all the wide plain was a sheet of white, covered again by the driven blinding snows of the prairie storm, then this hardy animal must paw down through the snow and find his own food, the dried grass curled close to the ground. Where the ox would perish the horse could survive. He was simple, practicable, durable, even under the hardest conditions. The horse of the American West ought to have place on the American coat of arms.

The horse might be a riding animal, or at times a beast of burden. In the earliest days he was packed simply, sometimes with hide pockets or panniers after the Indian fashion, with a lash rope perhaps holding the load together roughly. Later on in the story of the West there came a day when it was necessary to utilize all energies more exactly, and then the loading of the horse became an interesting and intricate science. The carry-all or pannier was no longer essential, and the packs were made up of all manner of things transported. The pack saddle, a pair of X’s connected with side bars, the “saw buck” pack-saddle of the West, which was an idea perhaps taken from the Indians, was the immediate aid of the packer. The horse and the lash rope in combination were born of necessity, the necessity of long trails across the mountains and the plains.

Thus the horse trebled the independence of the Western man, made it possible for him to travel as far as he liked across unknown lands, made him soldier, settler, trader, merchant; enabled him indeed to build a West that had grown into giant stature even before the day of steam.

CHAPTER V
THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS[^[3]]

On a busy street of a certain Western city there appeared, not long ago, a figure whose peculiarities attracted the curious attention of the throng through which he passed. It was a man, tall, thin, bronzed, wide-hatted, long-haired, clad in the garb of a day gone by. How he came to the city, whence he came, or why, it boots little to ask. There he was, one of the old-time “long-haired men” of the West. His face, furrowed with the winds of the high plains and of the mountains, and bearing still the lines of boldness and confidence, had in these new surroundings taken on a shade of timorous anxiety. His eye was disturbed. At his temples the hair was gray, and the long locks that dropped to his shoulders were thin and pitiful. A man of another day, of a bygone country, he babbled of scoutings, of warfare with savages, of the chase of the buffalo. None knew what he spoke. He babbled, grieved, and vanished.

Into the same city there wandered, from a somewhat more recent West, another man grown swiftly old. Ten years earlier this figure might have been seen over all the farming-lands of the West, most numerous near the boom towns and the land-offices. He was here transplanted, set down in the greatest boom town of them all, but, alas! too old and too alien to take root.

He wore the same long-tailed coat, the same white hat that marked him years ago—tall-crowned, not wide-rimmed; the hat that swept across the Missouri River in the early eighties. His beard was now grown gray, his eye watery, his expression subdued, and no longer buoyantly and irresistibly hopeful. His pencil, as ready as ever to explain the price of lots or land, had lost its erstwhile convincing logic. From his soul had departed that strange, irrational, adorable belief, birthright of the American that was, by which he was once sure that the opportunities of the land that bore him were perennial and inexhaustible. This man sought now no greatness and no glory. He wanted only the chance to make a living. And, think you, he came of a time when a man might be a carpenter at dawn, merchant at noon, lawyer by night, and yet be respected every hour of the day, if he deserved it as a man.

It was exceeding sweet to be a savage. It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. Those days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart on the earth again. Those early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part! There, surely, was a drama done under the strictest law of the unities, under the sun of a single day.

No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack. There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more incredibly keen in spirit. And now we come upon the tame and tranquil sequel of that vivid play of human action. “Anticlimax!” cries all that humanity that cares to think, that dares to regret, that once dared to hope. “Tell us of the West that was,” demands that humanity, and with the best of warrant; “play for us again the glorious drama of the past, and let us see again the America that once was ours.”

Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest may attach to a quest that goes farther than a mere summons for the spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West? What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.

In the pursuit of this line of thought we need ask only a few broad premises. These premises may leave us not so much of self-vaunting as we might wish, and may tend to diminish our esteem of the importance of individual as well as national accomplishment; for, after all and before all, we are but flecks on the surface of the broad, moving ribbon of fate. We are all,—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday,—but the result of the mandate that bade mankind to increase and multiply, that bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of the earth and its fullness allotted or made possible to us by that Providence to which all things belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.

The story of the taking over of the earth into possession has been but a story of travel. Aryan, Cymri, Goth, Vandal, Westerner—they are all one. The question of occupying the unoccupied world has been only a question of transportation, of invasion, and of occupation along the lines of least resistance. Hence we have at hand, in a study of transportation of the West at different epochs, a clue that will take us very near to the heart of things.

We read to-day of forgotten Phenicia and of ancient Britain. They were unlike, because they were far apart. The ancient captains who directed the ships that brought them approximately together were great men in their day, fateful men. The captains of transportation that made all America one land are still within our reach, great men, fateful men; and they hold a romantic interest under their grim tale of material things. You and I live where they said we must live. It was they who marked out the very spot where the fire was to rise upon your hearth-stone. You have married a certain Phenician because they said that this must be your fate. Your children were born because some captain said they should be. You are here not of your own volition. The day of volitions, let us remember, is gone.

The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binders, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The force of this primeval impulse was behind all those early actors, and Roundhead Cavalier, praying man and fighting man, who had this continent for a stage. It was behind the men that followed inland from the sea the first prophets of adventure. It is behind us to-day. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.

When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the west-bound adventurers travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer would seem easy. They traveled as did the Cimri, the Goths—in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters.

Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” The public has always edited it to read the “star” of empire that “takes it way” to the West. If one will read this poem in connection with a government census map, he can not fail to see how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, that holds between its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent census map, that marks the center of population of America with a literal star, and, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward, westward, ever westward! Excellent scenario, its scheme done in red and yellow and brown, patched each ten years, ragged, blurred, until, after a hundred years, the scheme is finished, and the color is solid all across the page, showing that the end has come, and that the land has yielded to the law!

The first step of this star of empire, that concluded in 1800, barely removed it from its initial point on the Chesapeake. The direction was toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a priceless possession. The restless tide of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest lines.

The first thrust of the out-bound population was not along the parallels of latitude westward, as is supposed to be the rule, but to the south and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat runs well down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even then they exemplified the great law of population that designates the river valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways.

Dear old New England, the land sought out as the home of religious freedom, and really perhaps the most intolerant land the earth ever knew, sometimes flatters herself that she is the mother of the West. Not so. New England holds mortgages only on the future of the West, not on its past. The first outshoots of the seaboard civilization to run forth into the West did not trace back to the stern and rock-bound shore where the tolerants were punishing those who did not agree with them.

New York, then, was perhaps the parent of the West? By no means, however blandly pleasant that belief might be to many for whom New York must be ever the first cause and center of the American civilization, not the reflection-point of that civilization. The rabid Westerner may enjoy the thought that neither New England nor New York was the actual ancestor. Perhaps he may say that the West had no parent, but was born Minerva-like. In this he would be wrong. The real mother of the West was the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. If you sing “arms and the man” for the West, you must sing Southerner and not Puritan, knight-errant and not psalmodist. The path of empire had its head on the Chesapeake. There was the American Ararat.

“The great American journeyings were far under way before New England appeared to realize that there was a greater America toward the West. The musket bearers of the New England states, the fighting men of the South, and the riflemen of what might already have been called the West, had finished the Revolutionary War long before New England had turned her eyes westward. The pilgrimage over the Appalachians was made, the new provinces of Kentucky and Tennessee were fighting for a commerce and a commercial highway of their own, while yet the most that New England, huddled along her stern and rock-bound shore, could do was to talk of shutting off these Westerners from their highway of the Mississippi, and compelling them to trade back with the tidewater provinces of what was not yet an America.

“Canny and cautious, New York and New England were ready to fear this new country in which they refused to believe; were ready to cripple it, although they declined to credit its future. The pioneers of the South fought their way into the West. New England bought her way, and that after all the serious problems of pioneering had been solved. The ‘Ohio Land Company’ of Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tucker and their none too honest associate, the New Bedford preacher, Manasseh Cutler, were engaged in the first great land steal ever known in the West. They did not fight the Indians for their holdings, but went to Congress, and with practical methods secured five million acres of land at a price of about eight or nine cents an acre; the first offer to Congress being a million dollars for a million and a half acres of what is now the state of Ohio, the payment to be in soldiers’ scrip, worth twelve cents on the dollar.

“The Ohio company took its settlers out to its new land as a railway does its colonists to-day. Reaching the Ohio River, they descended it in a bullet-proof barge, called ‘with strange irony’ the ‘Mayflower.’ They entered the mouth of the Muskingum and anchored under the guns of a United States fort.”[^[4]]

This is how New England got into the West. There is no hero story there. The men of the South, men of North Carolina and Virginia, most of whom had come from Pennsylvania and dropped down along the east slope of the Appalachians, as it were sparring these mountain ranges for an opening until at length they had found the ways of the game trails and Indian trails from headwater to headwater, and so had reached the west-bound streams—these actual adventurers had built Harrodsburg and Boonesborough seventeen years before the Ohio company entered the Muskingum. Already there was a West; even a West far beyond Boonesborough and its adjacent corn grounds.

This actual record of the upper states in the exploration of the West is to-day not generally remembered nor understood. Sometimes an ardent New Englander will explain that the Puritans would have earlier pressed out westward had it not been for the barrier of the Iroquois on their western borders. They read their history but ill who do not know that the Iroquois trafficked always with the English as against the French; whereas Kentucky, the land opened by the Southern pioneers, was occupied by a more dangerous red population, made up of many tribes, having no policy but that of war, and no friends outside of each separate motley hunting party, sure to be at knife’s point with either white or red strangers. The most difficult and most dangerous frontier was that of the South; yet it was the South that won through.

There are two explanations of this incontrovertible historical fact. One lies perhaps in the general truth that early pioneers nearly always cling to the river valleys, perhaps not more for purposes of transportation by water than in obedience to a certain instinct that seems to hold the pathways of the streams as foreordained guidance. The man that is lost in the wilderness hails with delight the appearance of a stream. It will lead him somewhere; it will guide him back again. Near it will be game, near it, too, rich soil. The man that enters the wilderness deliberately does so along the waterways.

All the great initial explorations have been made in this way. The men of Kentucky and Tennessee having reached the headwaters of the Kentucky, the Tennessee, the Holston or kindred riverways, moved out into their promised land along paths, as it were, foreordained. The rivers of the North did not run out into the West, but pointed ever toward the sea. This is one explanation of the somewhat inglorious part of New England in the discovery of the West. It does not explain her narrowness of view in regard to that West after it had been discovered by others; neither does this geographical explanation, in the opinion of many, cover the main phenomena of her timid attitude in regard to Western exploration.

The true reason, in the belief of these students, is to be found in the character of the New England population, as compared to the bolder breed of men who overran the western sections of Pennsylvania and for two generations were in continuous touch with the wilderness and its savagery. This subject is taken up interestingly by Horace Kephart, a scholar of much acquaintance with early American history, in the course of an able paper. It is very much worth while for any one who wishes an actual picture of the march across the Appalachians to read his conclusions.

“In a vague way we think of all the East as old,” says this writer, “and all the West as new. We picture civilization as advancing westward from the Atlantic in a long, straight front, like a wave or a line of battle. But in point of fact it was not so. There was a permanent settlement of Europeans a thousand miles to the west of us before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were thriving villages before Baltimore was founded; and our own city of St. Louis was building in the same year that New Jersey became a British possession. At a time when Daniel Boone was hunting beaver on the Osage and the Missouri, Fenimore Cooper was drawing the types for future ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ from his neighbors in a ‘wilderness’ only a hundred and fifty miles from New York City.

“American settlement advanced toward the Mississippi in the shape of a wedge, of which the entering edge was first Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, then the Shenandoah valley, then Louisville, and finally St. Louis. When the second census of the United States was taken, in 1800, nearly all the white inhabitants of our country lived in a triangle formed by a diagonal southwestward from Portland, Maine, to the mouth of the Tennessee River, here meeting another diagonal running northwestward from Savannah, with the Atlantic for a base. Central and western New York, northern Pennsylvania, and all the territory north of the Ohio River, save in its immediate vicinity, were almost uninhabited by whites, and so were Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Yet the state of Kentucky had half as many people as Massachusetts, and Tennessee had already been admitted into the Union.

“As a rule, geographical expansion proceeds along the lines of least resistance, following the natural highways afforded by navigable rivers and open plains. It is easily turned aside by mountain chains, dense forests, and hostile natives. Especially was this true in the days before railroads. But the development of our older West shows a striking exception to this rule; for the entering wedge was actually driven through one of the most rugged, difficult, and inhospitable regions to be found along the whole frontier of the British possessions.

“This fact is strange enough to fix our attention; but it is doubly strange when we consider that there was no climatic, political nor economic necessity for such defiance of nature’s laws. We can see why the Mississippi should have been explored from the north, rather than from its mouth, because Canada was settled before Louisiana, and it is easier to float downstream than to pole or cordelle against the current. But why was not the West entered and settled through the obviously easy course of the Mohawk Valley?

“Beyond this valley were gentle slopes, and many a route practicable for settlers into the rich country of Ohio. The central trail of the Iroquois, beaten smoother than a wagon-road, ran straight west from Albany, through the fairest portion of New York, to the present site of Buffalo, and thence followed the southern shore of Lake Erie into Ohio. Where it crossed the Genesee, the old war-trail of the Senecas branched off to the south, passing behind the farthermost ramparts of the Alleghanies, to the forks of the Ohio. Moccasined feet traveling over these trails for centuries had worn them from three to twelve inches into the ground, so that they were easy to follow on the darkest night. These were only two of several well-marked routes from ancient Albany to the new West. It was to this easy communication with the country beyond the Appalachians that the Iroquois owed their commanding position on the continent.

“These Iroquois were in the way, to be sure; but with them New York had every advantage over her sister provinces. Her policy toward these powerful Indians was conciliatory. She was allied with them against the French. The Six Nations ravaged the frontiers of all the other colonies, from Massachusetts to Carolina, and carried their conquests to the Mississippi, but they spared New York and even invited her to build forts on their border as outposts against the French. New York had the most influential Indian agent of his time in Sir William Johnson, who had married the sister of the Mohawk chief Brant, and by her had several sons who were war-chiefs of the Iroquois. In 1745 the Iroquois even ceded to New York a strip of land sixty miles wide, along the southern shores of lakes Ontario and Erie, extending to the modern Cleveland. It should have been easy for the Knickerbockers to secure passage for their emigrants into the western country had they chosen to ask it.

“On the other hand, the southern colonies had no easy access to the West. Nature herself had bidden these people to rest content in their tidewater regions, and frowned upon any westward expansion by interposing the mighty barriers of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, rising tier beyond tier in parallel chains from northern Pennsylvania to Alabama. Few trails crossed these mountains. From base to summit they were clad in dense forest, matted into jungle by luxuriant undergrowth. No one knew what lay beyond them, nor how far through this ‘forest, savage, harsh, impregnable,’ the traveler must bore until he reached land fit for settlement.

“It was well known, however, that the trans-Alleghany region, whatever might be its economic features, was dangerous ground. The Indians themselves could not occupy it, for it had been for ages the common battle-ground of opposing tribes. Any savage met within its confines was sure to be on the war-path against any and all comers. He that entered took his life in his hand.

“Thus the chances of success in any westward movement were in favor of New York and New England, and against Pennsylvania. Yet it was the latter that did the work. Central and western New York remained a wilderness until Missouri was settling with Americans. New England took little or no part in Western affairs until, the West having been won, Massachusetts and Connecticut, calmly overstepping New York and Pennsylvania, laid thrifty hand upon the public domain north of Pittsburg and west to the Mississippi.

“We have seen that the West was actually entered by the most difficult and hostile route, and this in spite of political and economic reasons for choosing a more northerly and easier line of advance. I do not remember that this has ever before been pointed out; but it is a fact of deep significance, for it determined what should be the temper of the great West, and what should be its course of development.

“The wedge of settlement was driven through the heart of the Alleghanies because there dwelt at the foot of the mountains a people more aggressive, more daring, and more independent than the tidewater stock. This people acted on its own initiative, not only without government aid, but sometimes in defiance of government. It won to the American flag not only the central West, but the Northwest and Southwest as well; and it was, for the most part, the lineal descendants of these men that first, of Americans, explored the far West, and subdued it for future settlement.

“This explains why Missouri, rather than the northern tier of new states, became in its turn the vanguard and outpost of civilization, as Kentucky and Tennessee had been before her, and Virginia and Pennsylvania before them. It explains why, when mountain and forest barriers had been left behind, and the vast Western plain offered countless parallel routes of travel to the Rockies, such routes were not used, but all the great transcontinental trails, whether to Santa Fé, California, or Oregon, focused for half a century at St. Louis or Independence. It explains why the majority of our famous scouts and explorers and Indian fighters were men whose strain went back to the Shenandoah valley or the Yadkin, and why most of them could trace their descent still farther back to Pennsylvania, mother of Western pioneers.”

There is much that is convincing in this study of facts and motives; yet perhaps the gentler and broader view is not that of personnel but of geography. I myself am more disposed to believe that St. Louis became great by reason of her situation on the great interior pathways of the waters; though all this may be said with no jot of abatement in admiration for the magnificent daring and determination of those men of the lower slopes of the Appalachians who, as history shows simply and unmistakably, were really the pioneers of the eastern, the middle and the most western portions of the splendid empire of the West. Let us reserve for a later chapter the more specific study of this typical adventurer and his origin, and pass for the present to the general consideration of the figure that we may call the American west-bound man.

We must remember that there had been two or three full American generations to produce him, this man that first dared turn away from the seaboard and set his face toward the sinking of the sun, toward the dark and mysterious mountains and forests, which then encompassed the least remote land fairly to be called the West. Two generations had produced a man different from the Old-World type. Free air and good food had given him abundant brawn. He was tall, with Anak in his frame. Little fat cloyed the free play of his muscles, and there belonged to him the heritage of the courage that comes of good heart and lungs. He was a splendid man to have for an ancestor, this tall and florid athlete that never heard of athletics. His face was thin and aquiline, his look high and confident, his eye blue, his speech reserved. You may see this same man yet in those restricted parts of this country which remain fit to be called American. You may see him sometimes in the mountains of Tennessee, the brakes of Arkansas or Missouri, where the old strain has remained most pure. You might have seen him over all the West in the generation preceding our own.

In time this early outbound man learned that there were rivers that ran, not to the southwest and into the sea, but outward, beyond the mountains and toward the setting sun. The winding trails of the Alleghanies led one finally to rivers that ran toward Kentucky, Tennessee, even farther out into that unknown, tempting land which still was called the West. Thus it came that the American genius broke entirely away from salt-water traditions, asked no longer “What cheer?” from the ships that came from across the seas, clung no longer to the customs, the costumes, the precedents or standards of the past.

There came the day of buckskin and woolsey, of rifle and ax, of men curious for adventures, of homes built of logs and slabs, with puncheons for floors, with little fields about them, and tiny paths that led out into the immeasurable preserves of the primeval forests. A few things held intrinsic value at that time—powder, lead, salt, maize, cow-bells, women that dared. It was a simple but not an ill ancestry, this that turned away from the sea-coast forever and began the making of another world. It was the strong-limbed, the bold-hearted that traveled, the weak that stayed at home.

Thus began the true American aristocracy, the aristocracy of ability. The dashing Cavalier, your high-churchman from England, was not the first over the Appalachians. It was the Protestant, the Quaker, the dissenter, the independent who led the way into another world and into another order of things.

Of this hardy folk who left home when yet there was no need of so doing, and who purposed never to come back from the land they were to discover,—types of that later proverb-making Western man who “came to stay,”—let us seek out one where there were many, some distant Phenician, some master of ways and means, some captain of his time. One man and one community may serve as typical of this epoch.

In 1779 one James Robertson, of the Watauga settlements of North Carolina, a steadfast man, heard certain voices that called him to the West. James Robertson, the steadfast, forming his company for this uncertain, perilous enterprise, said: “We are the advance guard of a civilization, and our way is across the continent.” Simple words,—yet that was in 1779!

Now, for the building of this one town, the town that is now the city of Nashville, and the capital of Tennessee, this leader had gathered three hundred and eighty persons, men, women, and children. All the women and children, one hundred and thirty in number, in charge of a few men, went by boat, scow, pirogue, and canoe, in the winter-time, down the bold waters of the Holston and Tennessee rivers. The rest traveled as best they might over the five hundred miles of “trace” across Kentucky. Of this whole party two hundred and twenty-six got through alive.

The boat party had many hundreds of miles of unknown and dangerous waters to travel, and the journey took them three months, a time longer than it now requires to travel around the world. They ran thirty miles of rapids on the shoals of the Tennessee, pursued and fired upon by Cherokees. Of this division of the party only ninety-seven got through alive, and nine of these were wounded. One was drowned, one died of natural causes and was buried, and the rest were killed by the Indians.

THE DOWN-RIVER MEN.

Their voyage was indeed “without a parallel in modern history.” Among those who survived the hardships of the journey was Rachel Donelson, later the wife of Andrew Jackson.

The path of empire in America, the path of corn and venison, was a highway that never ran backward. These men would never leave this country now that they had taken it. But what a tax was this that the barbaric land demanded of them! In November of 1780, less than a year after the party was first organized, there were only one hundred and thirty-four persons left alive out of the original three hundred and eighty, but in the settlement itself there had not been a natural death. The Indians killed these settlers, and the settlers killed the Indians. Death and wounds meant nothing to the adults. The very infants learned a stoic hardihood. Out of two hundred and fifty-six survivors, thirty-nine were killed in sixty days. Out of two hundred and seventeen survivors, the next season saw but one hundred and thirty-four left.

The spring of 1781 found only seventy persons left alive. But when the vote was cast whether to stay or return, not one man voted to give up the fight. In that West corn was worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and in its raising the rifle was as essential as the plow. Powder and lead were priceless. Man and woman together, fearless, changeless, they held the land, giving back not one inch of the west-bound distance they had gained!

In 1791 there were only fifteen persons left alive out of the three hundred and eighty that made this American migration. There had been only one natural death among them. In such a settlement there was no such thing as a hero, because all were heroes. Each man was a master of weapons, and incapable of fear. No fiction ever painted a hero like to any one of these. One man, after having been shot and stabbed many times, was scalped alive, and jested at it. A little girl was scalped alive, and lived to forget it. An army of Indians assaulted the settlement, and fifteen men and thirty women beat them off. Mrs. Sally Buchanan, a forgotten heroine, molded bullets all one night during an Indian attack, and on the next morning gave birth to a son.

This was the ancestral fiber of the West. What time had folk like these for powder-puff or ruffle, for fan or jeweled snuff-box? Their garb was made from the skin of the deer, the fox, the wolf. Their shoes were of hide, their beds were made of the robes of the bear and buffalo. They laid the land under tribute. Yet, so far from mere savagery was the spirit that animated these men that in ten years after they had first cut away the forest they were founding a college and establishing a court of law. Read this forgotten history, one chapter and a little one, in the history of the West, and then turn, if you like, to the chapters of fiction in an older world. You have your choice of lace or elkskin.

CHAPTER VI
THE MISSISSIPPI, AND INDEPENDENCE[^[5]]

There was a generation of this down-stream transportation, and it built up the first splendid, aggressive population of the West—a population that continued to edge farther outward and farther down-stream. The settlement at Nashville, the settlements of Kentucky, were at touch with the Ohio River, the broad highway that led easily down to the yet broader highway of the Mississippi, that great, mysterious stream so intimately connected with American history and American progress. It was easy to get to New Orleans, but hard to get back over the Alleghanies. Therefore, out of the mere fact that water runs downhill, arose one of the earliest and most dangerous political problems this country ever knew.

The riflemen of Sevier and Robertson saved Tennessee and Kentucky to the Union only that they might well-nigh be lost again to Spain. The Indian fighters of the West knew little how the scales trembled in the balance for the weak young government of the United States of America, lately come into place as an independent power. The authorities at Washington dared not be too firm with France or Spain, or even, with England. Diplomacy juggled across seas, while the riflemen of the West fought for the opening of that Great River which meant everything for them.

The league of Spain and the Cherokees kept up covert warfare against these early Westerners. The stark, staunch men of Robertson and Sevier hunted down the red fighters and killed them one by one over all the Western hunting-grounds and corn-grounds; and then they rebelled against Washington, and were for setting up a world of their own. They sent in a petition, a veritable prayer from the wilderness, the first words of complaint ever wrung from those hardy men.

“We endured almost unconquerable difficulties in settling this Western country,” they said, “in full confidence that we should be enabled to send our products to the market through the rivers that water the country; but we have the mortification not only to be excluded from that channel of commerce by a foreign nation, but the Indians are rendered more hostile through the influence of that nation.”

To add to the intricacy of this situation, now came one General James Wilkinson, late of a quasi-connection with the Continental army, who early discovered the profit of the trade to the mouth of the Mississippi. Discovering, likewise, the discontent of the West, which was almost wholly dependent upon that river for its transportation, he conceived the pretty idea of handing over this land to Spain, believing that in the confusion consequent upon such change his own personal fortunes must necessarily be largely bettered. The archives show the double dealings of Wilkinson with Spain, Great Britain, and the United States. He played fast and loose with friend and foe, until at length he found his own level and met in part his just deserts.

Meantime the stout little government at Washington, knowing well enough all the dangers that threatened it, continued to work out the problems crowding upon it. Some breathless, trembling years passed by—years full of wars and treaties in Europe as well as in America. Then came the end of all doubts and tremblings. The lying intrigues at the mouth of America’s great roadway ceased by virtue of that purchase of territory which gave to America forever this mighty Mississippi, solemn, majestic, and mysterious stream, perpetual highway, and henceforth to be included wholly within the borders of the West.

The acquisition of this territory was due not so much to American statesmanship or foresight as to either the freakishness or wisdom of Napoleon Bonaparte, then much disturbed by the native revolts in the West Indies, and harassed by the impending war with England. Whether England or France would land troops at New Orleans was long a question. The year that saw the Mississippi made wholly American was one mighty in the history of America and of the world.

The date of the Louisiana Purchase is significant not more in virtue of the vast domain added to the West than because of the fact that with this territory came the means of building it up and holding it together. It was now that for the first time the solidarity of this New World was forever assured. We gained a million uninhabited miles—a million miles of country that will one day support its thousands to the mile. But still more important, we gained the right and the ability to travel into it and across it and through it. France had failed to build roads into that country, and thereafter neither France nor any other foreign power might ever do so.

We who have the advantage of the retrospect understand the Mississippi and its tributaries far better than did the statesmen of a hundred years ago. Indeed, it was then the belief of many of the ablest minds that we ought not to accept this Louisiana Purchase even as a gift. Josiah Adams, in discussing the bill for the admission of Louisiana as a state, said: “I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that if this bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that the states which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must.”

This from Massachusetts, later to be the home of abolition and of centralization! It may sit ill with the sons of Massachusetts to reflect that their own state was the first one deliberately to propose secession. Still more advanced was the attitude of James White, who painted the following dismal picture of that West which was to be:

“Louisiana must and will be settled if we hold it, and with the very population that would otherwise occupy part of our present territory. Thus our citizens will be removed to the immense distance of two or three thousand miles from the capital of the Union, where they will scarcely ever feel the rays of the general government; their affections will become alienated; they will gradually begin to view us as strangers; they will form other commercial connections, and our interests will become distinct. These, with other causes that human wisdom may not now foresee, will in time effect a separation, and I fear our bounds will be fixed nearer to our houses than the waters of the Mississippi. We have already territory enough, and when I contemplate the evils that may arise to these States from this intended incorporation of Louisiana into the Union, I would rather see it given to France, to Spain, or to any other nation of the earth, upon the mere condition that no citizen of the United States should ever settle within its limits, than to see the territory sold for a hundred million of dollars and we retain the sovereignty. . . . And I do say that, under existing circumstances, even supposing that this extent of territory was a valuable acquisition, fifteen million dollars was a most enormous sum to give.”

How feeble is our grasp upon the future may be seen from the last utterance. The sum of fifteen million dollars seemed “enormous.” To-day, less than a century from that time, one American citizen has in his lifetime made from the raw resources of this land a fortune held to be two hundred and sixty-six million dollars.

One Western city, located in that despised territory, during the year just past showed sales of grain alone amounting to one hundred and twenty-three million three hundred thousand dollars; of live stock alone, two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars; of wholesale trade, seven hundred and eighty-six million two hundred and five thousand dollars; of manufactures—where manufactures were once held impossible—the total of seven hundred and forty-one million and ninety-seven thousand dollars.

It was once four weeks from Maine to Washington; it is now four days from Oregon. The total wealth of all the cities, all the lands, all the individuals of that once despised West, runs into figures that surpass all belief and all comprehension. And this has grown up within less than a hundred years. The people have outrun all the wisdom of their leaders. What would Daniel Webster, famous New Englander, doubter and discreditor of the West, say, were he to know the West to-day?

Yet the men of that day were not so much to blame, for they were in the infancy of transportation, and as no army is better than its commissary trains, so is no nation better than its transportation. We were still in the crude, primitive, down-stream days. Steam had not yet come upon the great interior waterways. The west-bound mountain roads across the Alleghanies were still only narrow tracks worn by the feet of pack-horses that carried mostly salt and bullets. The turnpikes fit for wagon traffic were Eastern affairs only. The National Road, from Wheeling to the westward, was restricted in its staging possibilities.

Between the hardy Western population and its earlier home there rose the high barrier of the Appalachians, to ascend whose streams meant a long, grievous and dangerous journey, a Journey commercially impracticable. The first traffic of the old mountain road was in salt and bullets, and it was a traffic that all went one way. The difficulties of even this crude commerce led to the establishment, as the very first manufacture ever begun in the West, of works for the production of salt. Bullitt’s Lick, on Salt Creek, was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, manufacturing community west of the Alleghanies, and part of the downstream trade of the day was in carrying kettles from Louisville down the Ohio and up Salt Creek to the lick. This route was in hostile Indian country, and every voyage held its own terrors.

We may note, then, the beginning of the commercial West in the local necessities of that West. For the first west-bound generation the problem of transportation had been largely a personal one. The first adventurers, with little baggage but the rifle and the ax, able to live on parched corn and jerked venison, with women almost as hardy as men, neither possessed nor cared for the surplus things of life. They subsisted on what nature gave them, seeking but little to add to the productiveness of nature in any way.

But now we must, presently, conceive of our Western man as already shorn of a trifle of his fringes. His dress was not now so near a parallel to that of the savage whom he had overcome. There was falling into his mien somewhat more of staidness and sobriety. This man had so used the ax that he had a farm, and on this farm he raised more than he himself could use—first step in the great future of the West as storehouse for the world. This extra produce could certainly not be taken back over the Alleghanies, nor could it be traded on the spot for aught else than merely similar commodities.

Here, then, was a turning-point in Western history. There is no need to assign to it an exact date. We have the pleasant fashion of learning history through dates of battles and assassinations. We might do better in some cases did we learn the time of certain great and significant happenings.

It was an important time when this first Western farmer, somewhat shorn of fringe, sought to find market for his crude produce, and found that the pack-horse would not serve him so well as the broad-horned flat-boat that supplanted his canoe. The flat-boat ran altogether down-stream. Hence it led altogether away from home and from the East. The Western man was relying upon himself, cutting loose from traditions, asking help of no man; sacrificing, perhaps, a little of sentiment, but doing so out of necessity, and only because of the one great fact that the waters would not run back uphill, would not carry him back to the East that was once his home.

So the homes and the graves in the West grew, and there arose a civilization distinct and different from that which kept hold upon the sea and upon the Old World. The Westerner had forgotten the oysters and shad, the duck and terrapin of the seaboard. He still lived on venison and corn, the best portable food ever known for hard marching and hard work. The more dainty Easterners, the timid ones, the stay-at-homes, said that this new man of the Western territory was a creature “half horse and half alligator.” It were perhaps more just to accord to him a certain manhood, either then or now. He prevailed, he conquered, he survived, and therefore he was right. There grew the aristocracy of ability.

The government at Washington saw this growing up of a separate kingdom, and sought to shorten the arc of this common but far-reaching sky; it sought to mitigate the swiftness of these streams, to soften the steepness of these eternal hills. Witness Washington’s forgotten canal from the headwaters of the James River—a canal whose beginning or end would puzzle the average American of to-day to define without special study. Witness many other canal and turnpike schemes, feeble efforts at the solution of the one imperishable problem of a land vast in its geography.

Prior to the Louisiana Purchase no man could think of a civilization west of the Mississippi; but there were certain weak attempts made by the government to bind to itself that part of the new lands that lay in the eastern half of the Mississippi valley. The “Ordinance of the Northwest,” done by the hand of Thomas Jefferson himself, makes interesting reading to-day. This ordinance sought to establish a number of states in the great valley “as soon as the lands should have been purchased from the Indians.”

It was proposed that each state should comprehend, from north to south, “two degrees of latitude, beginning to count from the completion of thirty-one degrees north of the equator, but any state northwardly of the forty-seventh degree shall make part of that state next below; and eastwardly and westwardly they shall be bounded, those on the Mississippi by that river on one side, and the meridian of the lowest point on the rapids of the Ohio on the other; those adjoining on the east by the same meridian on their western side, and on their eastern by the meridian of the western cape of the mouth of the Great Kanawha; and the territory eastward of this last meridian between the Ohio, Lake Erie, and Pennsylvania shall be one state.”

The Ordinance even went so far as to propose names for these future states, and quaint enough were some of the names suggested for those that are now Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. “Sylvania,” “Cherronesus,” “Asenesipia,” “Metropotamia,” “Pelesipia”—these are names of Western states that never were born, and in this there is proof enough of the fact that, though the government at Washington had its eye on the West, it had established no control over the West, and under the existing nature of things had no right ever to expect such control. As a matter of fact, the government never did catch this truant province until the latter, in its own good time, saw fit to come back home. This was after the West had solved its own problems of commercial intercourse.

It may now prove of interest to take a glance at the crude geography of this Western land at that time when it first began to produce a surplus, and the time when it had permanently set its face away from the land east of the Alleghanies. The census map (see Map No. 1) will prove of the best service, and its little blotches of color will tell much in brief regarding the West of 1800.

For forty years before this time the fur trade had had its depot at the city of St. Louis. For a hundred years there had been a settlement on the Great Lakes. For nearly a hundred years the town of New Orleans had been established. Here and there, between these foci of adventurers, there were odd, seemingly unaccountable little dots and specks of population scattered over all the map, product of that first uncertain hundred years. Ohio, directly west of the original Pennsylvania hotbed, was left blank for a long time, and indeed received her first population from the southward, and not from the East, though the New Englander, Moses Cleveland, founded the town of Cleveland as early as 1796.

Lower down in the great valley of the Mississippi was a curious, illogical, and now forgotten little band of settlers who had formed what was known as the “Mississippi Territory.” Smaller yet, and more inexplicable, did we not know the story of the old water-trail from Green Bay to the Mississippi, there was a dot, a smear, a tiny speck of population high up on the east bank of the Mississippi, where the Wisconsin emptied.

These valley settlements far outnumbered all the population of the state of Ohio, which had lain directly in the latitudinal path of the star. The West was beginning to be the West. The seed sown by Marquette the Good, by Hennepin the Bad, by La Salle the Bold, by Tonty the Faithful, seed cultivated by Boone and Kenton, by Sevier and Robertson and scores and hundreds of stalwart early Westerners—seed despised by an ancient and corrupt monarchy—had now begun to grow.

Yet, beyond the farthest settlements of the West of that day, there was still a land so great that no one tried to measure it, or sought to include it in the plans of family or nation. It was all a matter for the future, for generations much later. Compared with the movements of the past, it must be centuries before the West—whatever that term might mean—could ever be overrun. That it could ever be exhausted was, to be sure, an utterly unthinkable thing.

There were vague stories among the hardy settlers about new lands incredibly distant, mythically rich in interest. But who dreamed the import of the journey of strong-legged Zebulon Pike into the lands of the Sioux, and who believed all his story of a march from Santa Fé to Chihuahua, and thence back to the Sabine? What enthusiasm was aroused for the peaceful settler of the Middle West, whose neighbor was fifty miles away, by that ancient saga, that heroically done, Homerically misspelled story of Lewis and Clark? There was still to be room enough and chance enough in the West for any and all men.

The progress of civilization, accelerated with the passing of each century, was none the less slow at this epoch. There was an ictus here in the pilgrimage of humanity. It was as though the Fates wished that for a brief time the world might see the spectacle of a land of help and hope, of personal initiative and personal ambition. The slow-moving star of the West trembled and quivered with a new and unknown light, caught from these noble lakes and rivers, reflected from these mountains and these skies.

The stars of a new heaven looked down on another king, a king in linsey-woolsey. France kicked him forth a peasant, and, born again, he scorned the petty limitations of her seigniories, and stood on her rejected empire, the emperor of himself. England rotted him in her mines and ditches, but before the reversed flags of England were borne home from her war which did not subjugate, this same man, under another sky, was offering hospitality, and not obeisance, to her belted earls.

CHAPTER VII
ORIGIN OF THE PIONEER

“If we call the roll of American scouts, explorers, trappers, Indian fighters of the Far West; of men like John Colter, Robert McClellan, John Day, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, Joe Meek, Kit Carson and their ilk, who trapped and fought over every nook and cranny of the Far West, from the Canadian divide to the ‘starving Gila,’ we shall find that most of them were of the old Shenandoah-Kentucky stock that made the first devious trail from Pennsylvania along and across the Appalachians.”

This statement of a well-advised writer is curious and interesting to any student of the real West. It applies, also, of course, and much more closely, to those earlier pioneers that explored the first West, that of the Mississippi valley; the Boones, Kentons, Harrods, Finleys, Bryans, Stuarts and hundreds of others of the fighting breed of Virginia and North Carolina, the families of nearly all of whom had made one or more pilgrimages to the south or even to the southeastward before the great trek westward over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies.

America owes much of her national character and a vast part of her national territory to the individual initiative of these bold souls, who waited for no policies, no purchases, no leaderships, but pressed on, rifle and ax at hand, to find and hold our West for us. To-day we forget these men. The names of the captains of enterprise are lost in the tawdry modern lists of our so-called captains of industry. To-day, in a time that is fast becoming one of American serfdom, we lose in the haze of a national carelessness the figures of that earlier and more glorious day when the magnificent American West offered free scope and opportunity to a population wholly made up of men of daring, of individuality, of initiative, of self-leadership.

That was the day of the founding of the American aristocracy, of the birth of the American type, of the beginning of the American character. If we would study an actual American history, we can not leave out the American pioneer; and before, in our humble effort to approach the real genius of our America, we follow the strong sweep of the west-bound beyond the mighty Mississippi and toward the western sea, we shall do best to pause for a space and to make some inquiry into the origin and character of these early apostles of the creed of adventure.

If we ask chapter and verse in the study of the origin of this American frontiersman, this pioneer whose ambition was an indisputable personal independence, we shall not find the details of his ancestry among the records of wealthy and aristocratic dwellers of the seaboard region. The bone and brawn of the early frontier did not come from the Cavaliers, properly so-called; though it were doing the Cavaliers, the aristocrats, an injustice to say that they were deaf to the summons of adventure.

The man that dared life and fortune in moving to America would dare life and fortune west of the Alleghanies; and the history of many a colony and land grant in the early West is proof enough of this. The Cavalier or aristocrat, however, was not our typical axman or rifleman. The man of accomplished fortune, of stable social connections, dwelt farther back in that East that offered the most settled society of the American continent. The man in linsey-woolsey, the woodsman, the rifleman, was the man at the front, and it is in regard to his origin that we may profitably be somewhat curious. We shall, therefore, for a time be more concerned with the mountains of Pennsylvania than with the shores of Chesapeake Bay or the rich valleys of Maryland and the Old Dominion.

A student of the history of the early settlement of Pennsylvania[^[6]] furnishes data regarding the two great stems of the pioneer stock, the Quaker and the Scotch-Irish, which were most prominent among the many nationalities that flocked to the kindly kingdom of William Penn, where each man was treated as a man, and where independence in thought and action was the portion each claimed as his own.

“In the first half of the eighteenth century,” says this writer, “many thousands of Scotch-Irish, Germans and Welsh landed at Philadelphia and New Castle, and a large majority of them found homes in Pennsylvania. A number of the former turned to the westward from New Castle and established themselves in Maryland and Virginia. Among them were the ancestors of Meriwether Lewis, whose grandfather was born in Ulster, Ireland; and a number of other noted pathfinders of the West.

“A few isolated settlements were also formed in New Jersey and Delaware, but as before stated, the majority of them found homes in Pennsylvania. They swarmed up the valleys of the Delaware, Schuylkill and Susquehanna and their tributaries, and became at once the vanguard of frontier settlement; and they and their progeny continued to merit this distinction until the descendants of the Atlantic seaboard settlements looked down from the summit of the Rockies on the Pacific slope.

“In the last half of the eighteenth century many hundreds of families migrated from Pennsylvania southward into the valleys of the Shenandoah and the south branch of the Potomac, whence numbers of them continued their journey into North and South Carolina. The records of the Society of Friends in Bucks, Lancaster and Chester counties show that hundreds of certificates of removal were granted their members during this period, to remove to Virginia and the Carolinas; and many of these sturdy Quakers eventually found homes west of the Alleghanies, though not a few of them, like Daniel Boone, the great king of frontiersmen, found the exigencies of life on the frontier incompatible with peace principles, one of the cardinal tenets of their faith, and drifted out of the Society.

“During the same period hordes of people of other religious denominations removed from Pennsylvania over the same route. The counties of Augusta and Rockingham, in Virginia, were settled almost exclusively by Pennsylvanians from Bucks and Berks and the Cumberland valley, many of whom found homes farther west or left their bones to bleach in the savage-tenanted wilderness of the frontier.

“Boone himself was a native of Berks County and removed in 1750, when a lad of sixteen, with his family and a host of others, among whom were the Hankses, Hentons, Lincolns and many others whose names became familiar in the drama of the West, first to Virginia and later to North Carolina. William Stewart, a companion of Boone in Kentucky who was killed at Blue Licks, in 1785, was a native of Bucks County, and, it is claimed by relatives of both Boone and Stewart, was also a schoolmate of Boone’s.

“If this be true, it must have been in Virginia, as Boone never lived in Bucks County, though his father was a resident of New Britain township prior to the birth of Daniel. Soon after the death of Stewart, his sister, Hannah Harris, of Newtown, made an overland trip from Newtown, Bucks County, to Danville, Kentucky, to look after the estate bequeathed by Stewart to his sisters, Mary Hunter and Hannah Harris of Bucks County, and after her return made a report of the cost of the trip, which is on record at Doylestown.

“The power of attorney of Mary Hunter to Hannah Harris to proceed to ‘Kaintuckee’ to collect her share of the Estate of William Stewart is dated May seventh, 1787; and the power of attorney given by Hannah Harris to John Dormer Murray to transact her business in Bucks County, dated July twenty-fifth, 1787, states that she is ‘about setting out for Kaintuckee’ and therefore fixes approximately the date of the beginning of her journey.

“Dr. Hugh Shiells, of Philadelphia, who had married Ann, the daughter of Hannah Harris, May thirtieth, 1782, preceded her to Kentucky and took up his residence near Frankfort. He died in 1785, leaving an infant daughter Kitty, who on arriving at womanhood married Thomas Bodley, one of the trustees of Transylvania University.

“Archibald Finley, who, we believe, was the emigrant ancestor of the John Finley who led an exploring party into southern Kentucky from North Carolina in 1767, died in New Britain township, Bucks County, in March, 1749, leaving at least three sons, Henry, John and Alexander, of whom the two former removed to Virginia and later to Kentucky. They are believed to have been members of a party of a score or more families who left Bucks County about 1760 and journeyed to Loudoun County, Virginia, whence a number of them removed soon after to Orange County, North Carolina. Of this party were Robert Jamison and his family and the Fergusons of Plumstead.

“William, James and Morgan Bryan, brothers-in-law of Daniel Boone, who accompanied him from North Carolina to Kentucky, were also natives of Pennsylvania. They were the sons of Morgan Bryan, who came from Ireland prior to 1719, at which date his name appears on the tax list of Birmingham township, Chester County, as a ‘single man.’ He married the following year Martha Strode, and in the year 1734 with fifteen others obtained a grant of a large tract of land on the Opeckon and Potomac rivers near Winchester, Virginia, and removed thereon. From this point he removed with his family to the Yadkin, where Daniel Boone met and married his daughter, Rebecca, in 1755.

“There is an abundance of documentary evidence in Bucks County and in possession of her sons elsewhere, showing that many of the pioneers of Kentucky were natives of Bucks. The wills of many Bucks-countians devise estates to brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, ‘now or late of Virginia,’ or ‘in the county called Kaintuckee, Province of Virginia.’

“Rev. J. W. Wallace, of Independence, Missouri, has in his possession an old account book and diary combined, kept by his great-grandfather, John Wallace, who was born in Warrington, Bucks County, in 1748, and who served with distinction as a lieutenant in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, some of the entries having been made in this book while the owner was in camp with Washington at Valley Forge in the dark winter of 1777-8. Lieutenant John Wallace married into the Finley family and joining them in Loudoun County, removed with them into Kentucky in 1788.

“This remarkable book contains the record of the birth of John Wallace and his eight brothers and sisters, several of whom accompanied him to Kentucky, as well as an account of the journey of the emigrants from Virginia to Kentucky, which was made in wagons from Loudoun County to the Ohio River; from which point a portion of the party went in boats down the Ohio River to Limestone, now Maysville, then overland to Frankfort, while the remainder crossed over the mountains on pack-horses. They had doubtless been preceded by their relative, John Finley, of North Carolina.

“A similar book is in possession of W. W. Flack, of Davenport, Iowa, the great-great-grandson of the first owner. On the fly leaf is endorsed the following: ‘Receipt Book of William Flack, May 20, 1789.’ This William Flack was born in Buckingham township, Bucks County, on May eleventh, 1746, and died at Crab Orchard, Lincoln County, Kentucky, in 1824. He was a son of James and Ann (Baxter) Flack, Scotch-Irish emigrants who came to Bucks County about 1730 and settled near Bushington. William Flack was captain of the Buckingham company of militia during the Revolution, and is said to have been in active service at the battle of Brandywine and at other points. After the close of the war, accompanied by his brother Benjamin and a nephew of the same name, he removed to Kentucky, by way of Virginia.

“One of the memoranda in the old book is as follows: ‘Benjamin Flack was killed by the Indians at the Mouth of Salt River the 1st Day of March 1786.’ William Flack married Susannah Callison in Kentucky, March twenty-first, 1797, and the ‘Receipt Book’ records that event and the births of their six children, two of whom died in infancy. On hearing of the death of his father, which occurred September second, 1802, Captain Flack started for Bucks County, and it is related that his long absence on this tedious journey led his family to believe that he had been captured by the Indians.

“While these Pennsylvanians were wending their way southward, their brethren in the Cumberland and Juniata valleys, augmented by recruits from settlements farther east, were pushing their way westward into Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties, whence they migrated to Kentucky and the Northwest Territory.”[^[7]]

As to that war-like breed, the Scotch-Irish, famous in American frontiering, the same historian first quoted goes on in detailed description from which we may take the following:

“History has touched lightly upon the home life of the little colony of Ulster Scots, who settled on the banks of the Neshaminy in the townships of Warwick, Warrington and New Britain, in Bucks County, Pa.; but these people were none the less worthy of a prominent place in the records of the past. Driven by religious persecution from their native Highlands in the seventeenth century, the remnants of many a noble clan sought temporary refuge in the province of Ulster, Ireland, whence, between the years 1720 and 1740, thousands of them migrated to America, and peopled the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania’s frontier with a sturdy, rugged race that was destined to play an important part in the formation of our national character.

“Clannish by nature and tradition, they clung together in small communities of two score or more families, a majority of them related by ties of blood or marriage. They took up the unsettled portions of the new province. Accustomed for generations to the rugged mountain sides of their own native land, the roughness of the new territory did not discourage them. In fact, the steep hillsides on the banks of our rivers and smaller streams, shunned or neglected by the early English settlers, seem to have had an especial attraction for them.

“Possessed of a character as stern and uncompromising as the granite of their native mountains, this little colony did not concern itself in the affairs of its neighbors. Indeed there was no occasion to do so. They had brought with them the things they needed, and had inherent in their nature that which made them a people separate and apart from the communities by which they were surrounded. In their lives and characters was a declaration of independence that in itself nourished the spirit of freedom, which was to carry these people into the thick of the fight when the time arrived to bid defiance to the mother country.

“This spirit was further augmented by their independence and resources in the development of the material affairs of the colony. As previously stated, there were among the first settlers men of every trade and calling calculated to make the colony self-sustaining. There were husbandmen, weavers, smiths, masons, joiners, cord-wainers, millers and tradesmen, whose industry and thrift made it possible for the schoolmaster and preacher to devote himself exclusively to the intellectual and spiritual needs of the community. But with true Scotch economy, the teacher and preacher were often one and the same. As an illustration may be cited the founding of Tennent’s famous Log College as an adjunct to the Neshaminy Church, of which he was pastor.

“The stimulus given to civil and religious freedom by the uninterrupted exercise of these liberties, in strong contrast to the repression and persecution in the old country, cannot be overestimated. Princeton, as well as like institutions elsewhere, had its inception in our own Log College; and Finley, its first president, was akin to those of the same name in Warrington.

“The sons of Bucks County’s sturdy pioneers were constantly pushing on beyond our frontiers, carrying with them the lessons of frugality, piety and independence learned in this primitive community. They formed new colonies and engendered therein the love of freedom, which, when the Revolutionary War broke out, easily made the Scotch-Irish element the dominant party in the struggle for national independence in our state. Independence accomplished, they returned to their homes and again took up the business of self-government, broadened and refined by contact with the outside world, the primitive characteristics of their early life gone, but retaining the independence and courage of their forebears which had developed in them the best elements of citizenship.”

CHAPTER VIII
DANIEL BOONE

In preceding chapters we have taken up in general and in particular the origin, the purpose and the progress of the early American frontiersman. We have seen how this man, impelled by one reason or another, began to push outward on his way over the Appalachian range into the valley of the Mississippi. We have seen that the course of west-bound civilization was at first not wholly along the easiest way, but over barriers that had apparently been established by nature as insurmountable.

From headwater to headwater, among these rugged hills, from one valley into another, ever and ever westward, the early American had won his way, until he struck the waters running into the lower Gulf by way of that great highway of the interior floods, the Mississippi River. We have seen that for a space the early population did not head directly westward, but dropped down from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia, and from Maryland and Virginia into the Carolinas.

Many of the early adventurers seem to have made their halting and rallying ground in North Carolina. Here were some of the men of Watauga, men who were to people Tennessee, men who were to discover and settle the grand state of Kentucky, that steadfast portion of our Western empire whose fidelity was to thwart all of those early efforts at Western sedition and secession that once threatened the unity of the American people.

Having thus dealt in generalizations, we shall perhaps now do well to study some type, some product, of this early civilization, some character that shall indicate the general characteristics of the land and people of that early time. In this desire we fall naturally on the romantic yet pertinent story of that typical and historical frontiersman, Daniel Boone.

Among the great sayings of great men there is one that rings like a trumpet voice through all the press of years. “Here stand I,” said Martin Luther. “Here I stand. I can not otherwise. God help me!” If we should come to comparisons, we might perhaps call Daniel Boone the Luther of frontiering, the evangel of adventure, the prophet of early west-bound daring. Certainly he was the most forward, the most present, the most instant man of his place and time.

If we endeavor to see Daniel Boone, the man, as he actually was, we find ourselves at the outset dealing with a character already approaching the mythical in quality. Thus, in regard to his personality, certain folk imagine him as tall, thin, angular, uncouth. Others will portray to you a man with voice like thunder in the hills, with gore ever in his eye, in his voice perpetually the breathings of insatiate hate and rage. They will insist that Boone was bloody minded, overbearing, a man delighting in slaughters and riotings. Such pictures are utterly wrong; so much we may discover to be absolutely sure from the scant record of Boone’s real life.

He was Quaker-bred, as we have seen. A sweeter soul than his we shall not find though we search all the pages of history. Meeting every species of danger, he remained undaunted. Meeting every manner of adversity, he remained unsoured. With every reason for conceit, he remained unbitten of any personal vanity. To the end of his life it was his belief that he was “an instrument ordained by Providence to settle the wilderness;” yet he lost no time in posing himself in any supposititious sainthood. Nor must we imagine him crude or ignorant in his simplicity, for those who knew him best state that he was “a man of ambition, shrewdness and energy, as well as of fine social qualities and an extreme sagacity.”

He was learned in the knowledge useful at his time, although of books he wist not at all. Deeply religious in the true sense of religion, a worshiper of the Great Maker as evidenced in His works, he was not a church member. There was no vaunting in his soul of his own righteousness; yet never was he irritable even in old age, when the blood grows cold, and the thwarted ambitions come trooping home to roost in the lives of most of us. “God gave me a work to perform,” said he, “and I have done my best.” With this feeling he lived and died content.

Regarding the Boone of early years, we find it difficult to frame a clear picture, but there is more information obtainable regarding his later life, and we can see him then clearly. A man reaching the ripe age of eighty-six, with five generations of his family living at the same time; a man snowy haired, yet still of ruddy complexion, of frame still unbent, with kindly and gentle personal habits—this is the real Daniel Boone: no swearer of oaths, no swashbuckler, no roisterer, but a self-respecting, fearless gentleman, steadfast, immovable from his fixed purpose, inalienable from the mission which he conceived to be his own.

A writer who knew him late in life says that on his introduction to Colonel Boone his impressions were those of “surprise, admiration and delight.” In boyhood he had read of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky, the celebrated hunter and Indian fighter, and in imagination he portrayed a “rough, uncouth looking specimen of humanity, and, of course, at this period of life, an irritable and intractable old man. But in every respect,” says this biographer, “the reverse appeared. His high bold forehead was slightly bald, and his silver locks were combed smooth. His countenance was ruddy and fair, and exhibited the simplicity of a child. His voice was soft and melodious, and a smile frequently played over his face in conversation. His clothing was of the plain, coarse manufacture of the family. Everything about him indicated that kind of comfort that was congenial to his habits and feelings, and he evinced a happy old age. Boone was a fair specimen of the better class of Western pioneers, honest of heart and liberal—in short, one of nature’s noblemen. He abhorred a mean action and delighted in honesty and truth. He never delighted in the shedding of human blood, even that of his enemies in war. His remarkable quality was an unwavering and invincible fortitude.”

As to personal description, Boone was neither a tall nor a thin man. He was not angular nor bony. His frame was covered not with cloying fat but with firm and easily playing muscles, and he carried none of the useless tissue of the man of civilization. His weight was “about one hundred and seventy-five pounds.” Audubon, who met him late in his life, says: “He approached the gigantic in stature. His chest was broad and prominent, and his muscular powers were visible in every limb. His countenance gave indication of his great courage, enterprise and perseverance.”

Yet in person Boone did not quite reach the six-foot mark, but was just below five feet and ten inches in stature, some say five feet eight inches, being therefore of exactly that build which good judges of men esteem to be most desirable for combined strength, activity and endurance. He was rather broad shouldered: that is to say, his shoulders nicely overhung his hips. All agree that he was of “robust and powerful proportions.” One historian speaks of his “piercing hazel eye”; yet this is but romancing.

Most portraits of Daniel Boone are the products of imagination. The most authentic, perhaps the only authentic portrait of him, is that painted in 1820 by Chester Harding, “who,” says an early writer, “of American artists is the one most celebrated for his likenesses.” When Harding made his portrait of Boone, the latter was very feeble, and had to be supported during the sittings. This portrait shows a face thin and pale, with hair of snowy whiteness and eye “bright blue, mild and pleasant.” This blue eye is of the best color in all the world for keenness of vision, for quickness and accuracy with the rifle. The Harding portrait does not show the square chin that some writers give to Boone; and certainly it portrays no ferocious looking ruffian, but a man mild, gentle and contemplative, “not frivolous, thoughtless or agitated.”

As to Boone’s appearance early in life, we must to some extent join the others who imagine or presume. It is fair to suppose that in complexion he was florid, with the clear skin, sometimes marked with freckles, that you may see to-day in the mountains of the Cumberland, in parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, sometimes in North Carolina and Mississippi. The color of his hair was never that of “raven blackness.” Perhaps it was brown, but not a finely filamented brown. It was more likely blond, and perhaps indeed carried a shade of red. Certainly the ends of his hair were bleached a tawny yellow, that splendid yellow that you may see even to-day in the hair and beard and mustaches of the outdoor men of the American West.

In his younger days he often wore the half savage garb of the early American hunters—the buckskin or linsey hunting shirt, the fringed leggings of the same material, with moccasins made of the skin of the deer or buffalo. His hat was as chance would have it. Perhaps sometimes he wore a cap of fur.

His weaponry we may know exactly, for his rifle can be seen to-day, preserved by his descendants. It is the typical long-barreled, crooked-stocked, small-bore American rifle, with the wooden stock or fore end extending along the full length of the barrel. There are a few rude attempts at ornamentation on this historic arm. The sights lie close to the barrel, after the fashion of those deadly ancient weapons. The wood is rotting a little bit where the oil of long-ago cleaning operations has touched it. Perhaps the spring of the lock is a trifle weak. Yet we may not doubt that, were Daniel Boone alive to-day, he could teach the old piece to voice its music and could show again its ancient deadly art.

In chronology Boone’s time runs back to that of Washington. He was born November second, 1734, the date of Washington’s birth being 1732. His older brother was called Squire Boone, after the first American Boone, who was himself an Englishman, but who came to America early in the history of the lower colonies. The Boone homestead was once located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, but Daniel was born after his parents had moved into Berks County, Pennsylvania, near the town that is now Reading. Some historians say he was born in Bucks County.

In his youth Daniel did not seek knowledge through the medium of books.[^[8]] His mind was “not of the most ardent nature.” Before him lay the great book of the Wilderness. Thus he became well acquainted with the habits of wild game animals, not ascribing to these creatures, we may be sure, any of those fanciful qualities which are accorded them in the silly fashion of these days, but knowing them as they actually were, and betimes using them, as was planned in the scheme of nature.

When Boone was eighteen years of age his family heard many stories about the Yadkin River country of North Carolina. Forthwith they moved through the Shenandoah valley into what was then a yet wilder country than that of Pennsylvania. Here we have mythical tales of a fire hunt at night in which Daniel Boone “shined the eyes” of a certain maiden; of a deadly aim miraculously stayed, and a subsequent marriage unceremoniously sped. As to the fire hunt we may doubt, but as to the marriage there is no question. Boone married Rebecca Bryan in 1755. Therefore Daniel must move once more, this time farther up the Yadkin, where the forests were yet more quiet, and neighbors still more distant.

Previously to his marriage Boone had been a hunter,—what we would now call a professional hunter. He sometimes took hides and furs to the more distant Eastern settlements, and so saw some of the Virginia towns. He was, however, not merely a half-savage woods wanderer, although a past master in all woodcraft. The year before his marriage he was with the Pennsylvania militia, who fought the Indians along the border after the French had defeated George Washington and his Virginians at Great Meadows. In the fatal Braddock fight Daniel Boone was a wagoner in the baggage train, and barely escaped with his life in the panic flight.

At twenty-one he was a man grown, matured, acquainted with all the duties and dangers of frontier life, physically fit for feats of strength, activity and endurance, and both mentally and physically a perfect machine for the purposes of vanguard work in the wilderness. His imagination painted him no gloomy picture of peril, but only scenes of things delectable a little farther to the west, across the hills that faced him. His emotions did not prevent his walking forthwith into what might be peril; and having entered perils, he was content if each day found him yet alive, nor did his mind entertain forebodings as to the morrow. The creed of the wilderness, the creed of wild things had entered into his soul.

They call Daniel Boone explorer, hunter, Indian fighter. Let us figure him as philosopher. Temperament and training gave footing for that part of his philosophy that embodied his permanent personal conviction that “God had appointed him as an instrument for the settlement of the wilderness.”

Boone, after his marriage, and after his edging out westward toward the head of the Yadkin, lived much as he had done before. His cabin was no better than his neighbor’s, his little corn farm was much as theirs, albeit his table always had wild meat enough and to spare, and there were hides and furs in abundance. By this time two generations of white men had held this slope of the Appalachians. The buffalo had in all likelihood crossed the mountains to the westward, though one writer says they were “abundant” on the Yadkin at this time. Boone may perhaps have seen an elk now and then along the Yadkin, but even this is not certain. Bear, deer, turkey, small furred animals, he took in numbers. He was content, nor did he differ much from his fellows. He must have been about thirty years of age before he began to evince traits distinctly different from those of his scattered wilderness neighbors; before he began to hear the Voices, whispering yet irresistible, that called him on; those Voices of the West, which for a hundred years called our best and boldest to come out into the unknown and the alluring; those Voices which to-day are perforce stilled forever.

It was in the year 1769, in the month of May, that Boone started out for his first determined exploration of “the far-famed but little-known land of Kentucky.” He had before this time been eager to cross the range and see for himself; indeed, he had made one short hunting trip into what is now the eastern edge of the state of Kentucky. Now, in the prime of life, at thirty-five years of age, he felt that the time had come for him to cross the range and make his abiding place in the West.

We are accustomed to think that Boone was the first explorer of Kentucky, but such was by no means the case. Boone’s first trip across the mountains, to the headwaters of the Holston, was in 1761. John Peter Salling, a West Virginian, crossed Kentucky and Illinois as early as 1738. Doctor Thomas Walker and a party of Virginians had long before deliberately explored a part of Kentucky; and in 1751 Boone’s Yadkin neighbor, Christopher Gist,—the same Gist that accompanied Washington in his dangerous winter trip to the French forts on the Ohio,—made yet fuller explorations.

Some of these early voyagings were not made of intent. Salling crossed Kentucky as a captive of the Indians, who took him as far west as Kaskaskia; and Mary Draper Ingles, “the first American bride west of the mountains,” whose father established the first actual settlement west of the Alleghanies, was in 1755 taken captive by the savages, and carried across Kentucky and parts of Ohio and Indiana, thus being an explorer quite against her will.

Two hunters from Pittsburg, James Harrod and Michael Steiner or Stoner, after pushing out into the Illinois country, crossed the Ohio and traveled quite across Kentucky, as far south as the present city of Nashville, Tennessee. Steiner and Harrod were friends of Boone’s, and Harrod built his stockade of Harrodsburg a year before Boonesborough was begun, his journey with Steiner having been made two years before Boone made his pilgrimage across the Divide.

Kasper Mansker or Mansco, later a famous scout and Indian fighter, went with the Virginian “Long Hunters” into Kentucky in 1769. John Finley or Finlay had traded with the Indians on the Red River of Kentucky in 1752, some years before Boone saw that region. Finley was an associate of Boone’s in the border wars before Boone was married, and it was Finley, in all likelihood, that first set Boone aflame with the desire to see and settle in Kentucky. Yet he might have had the counsel of James McBride, who in 1754 visited the mouth of the Kentucky River, and came back to say that he “had found the best tract of land in North America, and probably in the world.” Finley added to these stories, and clinched it all by saying that game of all kinds was abundant, that the mountains were beautiful beyond description, and that, moreover, salt could be manufactured on the spot.

This last argument had very much to do with the settlement of Kentucky. Salt and lead were essentials. Salt was very heavy. The transportation across these grim mountains was very difficult. If one could have salt in Kentucky, it would not be necessary for one to come back. To-day we can scarcely understand this reasoning, once so cogent.

To strengthen the grasp upon historical facts and dates it is sometimes well to begin at the time close at hand, and go backward. We may therefore make a reversed recapitulation of the explorations of Kentucky, this dark and bloody hunting and fighting ground of many tribes of strong-legged and peppery-headed savages.

In 1770 the “Long Hunters” of Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs were in Kentucky—indeed, ran across Daniel Boone there; yet Kentucky was then an oldish land. In 1766 James Smith and five others explored much of west Tennessee, and worked north as far as Illinois. The Virginian, John McCullough, with one white companion, saw Kentucky in the summer of 1769, pushed on northward as far as the point where Terre Haute, Indiana, now stands, and later descended the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Uriah Stone took a party of twenty hunters over the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in the month of June, 1769, one month later than Boone’s journey thither; but Stone had been in Kentucky in 1766.

George Washington was on the Ohio River in 1770 and 1767; John Finley in 1752; Christopher Gist in 1750; Doctor Thomas Walker in 1748; John Peter Salling and John Howard, in 1742, we have noted. Before all these was the French expedition of 1735. Indeed, just one hundred years before Boone’s journey into Kentucky, John Lederer, a Virginian, crossed the Alleghanies and fared westward for some distance; and ninety-nine years previous to Boone’s first glimpse of the delectable land, Thomas Batts and party had “taken possession” of the headwaters of the Great Kanawha in the name of Charles II.

We therefore see, with what will be a certain surprise to the average reader of American history, that Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian land was not wholly unknown but indeed fairly well understood and accurately forecast in possibilities, more than a generation before Daniel Boone ever saw it. Where, then, is Boone’s fame as an explorer? Upon what does his reputation as an adventurer rest? What claim had he to hold himself as an “instrument for the settlement of the wilderness”?

The answer to all these doubts is read in the record of the holding of Kentucky. It is found in the inefficacy of a “taking possession” by means of the temporary planting of a flag and the empty claiming of a territory extending from sea to sea. The flag of Boonesborough was planted never to come down. The stockade of the homebuilders was defended by an “unwavering fortitude.” Kentucky discovered Daniel Boone, not Daniel Boone discovered Kentucky. Read it in this way and all shall be plain.

The birth of a new man in the world, the American, had now taken place. The Old World explorers took possession with a flag, furled it and carried it away again. The new man, the American, flung out a flag that has never yet come down in all the world, and which, please God! never shall so long as we remain like to the first Americans. John Finley guided Daniel Boone across the Cumberland Gap; but he guided him into a land now ready for a Daniel Boone—into a West now ready for the American man.

It was, then, in the month of May, 1769, that Boone left the Yadkin settlements and started westward. He had as companions John Finley, Joseph Holden, James Monay or Mooney, William Coole or Cooley, and John Stewart or Stuart. Of all the different expeditions into the region west of the Appalachians this was the most important. Following its doings, you shall see the long spur of the Anglo-Saxon civilization thrusting out and out into the West—to the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Rockies, the Pacific—and never setting backward foot.

The journey over the mountains was not rapid and not continuous, it being necessary for the party to hunt as well as to explore. The rifle, the ax, the horse, the boat, were their aids and agents, their argument and answer to the wilderness. Evolution had gone on. The American was born.

Boone and his friends seem to have camped on the east side of the Cumberland Mountains, where they remained for “some days.” It was from this camp that they made expeditions, and at length climbed to a certain ridge whence they could see the glorious realm of Kentucky. On this day they saw their first herd of buffalo, the first trail-makers over the Appalachians, of which they killed some numbers. They saw, also, elk, deer and other animals. Boone was delighted. There thrilled in his heart all the joy of the hunter and explorer. Now the little party moved over to the Red River, where Finley had formerly been located. “Here,” said Boone, “both man and beast may grow to their full size.” That was good American prophecy.

For six months this adventurous little party lived and hunted in their new empire. Then, swiftly and without warning, there came a taste of some of the disadvantages of this wild residence. Stewart and Boone were taken captive by the Indians and were carried to the north, a march of seven days. On the seventh night they made their escape and came back to their bivouac on the Red River, only to find that their friends had left them and returned to the settlements. As offset to this unpleasant news came their present discovery by Squire Boone and one companion, Alexander Neeley, who had followed the adventurers all the way into Kentucky. Daniel’s older brother had brought with him some needful supplies, chief of these powder and lead, worth far more than gold and silver.

“Soon after this period,” goes on the simple and businesslike chronicle, “John Stewart was killed by the Indians.” Hence the two Boone brothers were left alone, Squire Boone’s companion having met his fate in some mysterious manner, perhaps at the hands of the Indians, though others state that he was devoured by wolves,—a very unlikely story. The two brothers built themselves a rude cabin of poles and bark, and there they spent the fall and summer of 1769. In May of the following year Squire Boone returned to North Carolina.[^[9]]

It is now that for the first time we may accord justice to the picture that shows us the pioneer, Daniel Boone, alone in the wilderness of Kentucky. He was at this time, so far as he knew, the only white man in that entire section of country. Fearless, adventurous and self-reliant, he extended his wanderings farther to the west, and visited the site of what is now the city of Louisville. His life depended entirely upon his own vigilance. He was without bread or salt, without even a dog to keep him company or serve as guard. Naturally he met the savages. Once when pursued by the Indians, he escaped by the clever artifice of swinging himself far to one side of his trail by means of a depending grape-vine—a stratagem not recorded of any other Western adventurer.

He seems to have been happy, alone in a solitude whose nature one can not understand who has never found himself under conditions at least mildly similar. His consolation came in his communings with the wild things about him, in his readings in the great book of nature. His gallery was the magnificent one of wood and stream and hill. “He stood upon an eminence, whence, looking about in astonishment, he beheld the ample plain and beauteous upland, and saw the river rolling in silent dignity. The chirp of the birds solaced his cares with music. The numerous deer and elk which passed him gave him assurance that he was in the midst of plenty. Cheerfulness possessed his mind. He was a second Adam—if the figure be not too strong—giving names to springs and rivers and places all unknown to civilized man.” Such was the kingdom of the West.

Now came again the faithful Squire Boone, all the way from the far-off Yadkin. These two discovered country of such fertility and such abundance in game that they no longer had any heart left for the more barren region of North Carolina. They determined to bring thither their families, and the fall of that year saw them both back at the old home, making plans for the pilgrimage into the new world beyond the Alleghanies. Restless and ill-content we may suppose Daniel to have been, for it was not until the fall of 1773 that he was able to sell his farm and get together his effects.

Five families left the Yadkin with him for Kentucky, these being joined later by forty men, all of whom traveled under the guidance of Boone. They proceeded westward in pastoral cavalcade, driving their herds and carrying their effects with them. So far, very well, until the tenth of October, when came the first ambuscade of the savage Indians. Six men of the party were killed, among these a son of Daniel Boone. The cattle were scattered or destroyed. No wonder that all lost heart except the steadfast leader. He was content to remain with the retreating party in the settlements of the Clinch River only until June of the following year.

Now, biding his time, and longing for greater adventures, Boone receives a message from the governor of Virginia. It seems there are certain surveyors who have gone down the Ohio River and have lost themselves in the wilderness. Could Daniel Boone discover these surveyors for the governor? Assuredly. And hence he undertakes his first real mission of independent leadership. He has but one companion, Michael Stoner or Steiner, and before them lie many hundred miles of trackless forest, with no road, no path, no trail. Yet the surveyors are found and led safely back to their own.

This act seems to inspire confidence in Boone, and Colonel Henderson, a famous land speculator, employs him as his agent for the purchase from the Southern Indians of certain lands lying south of the Kentucky River. Boone is successful in these negotiations. It is necessary now that there should be a road established between these outlying lands and the door of civilization. Who better than Boone to establish this wilderness trail? He lays out the way from the Holston to the Kentucky River. We are told, without unnecessary flourish, that “in this work four of his party were killed and five wounded.”

It was in April, 1775, that Boone erected a station or palisade on the Kentucky River near a salt lick. We are told that the stockade was built “sixty yards from the south bank of the stream.” This was close to the present site of the town of Frankfort, Kentucky. Another writer says the date of the foundation of Boonesborough—as the station was called—was June fourteenth, 1775. Dates are unimportant. The fact is that Boone during that spring attained his immediate and most cherished ambition. He established his home in the heart of this beautiful land of Kentucky.

Thither he moved his family, his wife and daughter being the first white women willingly and of intent to set foot on the soil of Kentucky. Boone was now in the heyday of life, strong, fearless, tireless, a keen hunter, a cool-headed warrior. The ways of the wilderness were known to him. The imprint on the moss, the discolored water at the fountain, the broken bough, the abraded bark on the tree-trunk—all these things were an open book. No Indian could imitate the chatter of the squirrel, the calling of the crow, the gobbling of the wild turkey in his signals to his fellow savage, so closely that the acute ear of this master hunter did not detect the deceit. If savages crossed the country within a score of miles of his station, Boone knew of them, knew how they were armed, knew what was their purpose in that land. None could have been better equipped than he as “an instrument for the settlement of the wilderness.”

Life went on in Kentucky much as on the Yadkin, on the Clinch or on the Holston. White men began to gather in at the station of Boonesborough, or at one of the two or three other posts that now were established in the land. These white men, shoulder to shoulder, fought the savages cheerfully, continuously, never for a moment thinking of surrendering their hold. The leader of this wild warfare was Daniel Boone, the man of “unwavering fortitude.”

The war of the rebellion against the Old World was now going on apace. Great Britain had given the red savages below the Great Lakes better arms and had deliberately incited a more insatiate enmity against the white man. Whereas the Indians had at first adopted prisoners into their tribe, they now became more savage and implacable, in many more instances killing such prisoners as fell into their hands.

Here we find ourselves again to some extent in the realms of imagination as to the adventures of Daniel Boone. We meet the ancient anecdote of the capture by the Indians of Boone’s daughter, in company with two daughters of the neighboring Calloway family. Some say that the children were out hunting up the cows, others that they were in a canoe on the river, and that the canoe was taken away by a savage who swam out and made them prisoners. We may be sure that Boone and Calloway raised a party in pursuit, and it may be deemed historical fact that they rescued their daughters; though some state that the rescue was effected within a few miles of the post, whereas others place it after a long journey, and state that Boone and Calloway were themselves taken prisoners by the savages, and in turn rescued by their surviving companions only after a bitter struggle. One may suit himself in these matters, yet he must believe that the settlement of Boonesborough was the center of a most savage and relentless warfare.

The civilized necessity for salt was one of the chief causes of danger for these Kentuckians. In 1778 Boone, with twenty-seven companions, was engaged in salt-making at the Blue Licks, when they were surrounded by a large band of Indians. Boone was made captive, with others, and taken north across the Ohio River. These savages were Shawanese, from the Pickaway Plain. Eventually they took Boone as far north as Detroit, where the commandant, Hamilton, pleased with Boone’s manly character, undertook to ransom him from the savages. The latter, however, would not hear to this, and after some parleying concluded to make Boone one of their tribe.

He lived with them for some months, his fate meantime quite unknown to his friends at Boonesborough. At length, discovering a war party of more than four hundred savages preparing to invade the Kentucky frontier, he escaped from his captors, journeyed two hundred miles to the southward, and saved not only Boonesborough but all the infant posts of this new commonwealth beyond the Alleghanies. This, were there naught else to commend him, should establish Boone’s place as one of the great pillars of the west-bound civilization.

After the savages were at last beaten away in this attack, Boone found that he was a man not without a country, but without a family. His wife, supposing him dead, had returned to the old home on the Yadkin. There is a wide hiatus here in the Boone history, regarding which Boone himself is reticent.

It is probable that at this time there began those legal difficulties that later caused the pioneer to leave his chosen land. He had been given a grant of land by the governor of Virginia, but the state of Kentucky had never been surveyed, and it was the fashion and privilege of every holder of one of these loose titles to locate his land as he pleased, and to record it in the simplest and most primitive fashion. Thus there came to be many claimants for the best of the lands, the desirable tracts being sometimes deeply covered by these old-time “shingle titles.”

The courts swiftly followed into these crude little Kentucky communities. It may have been the legal complications in which Boone now found himself that made him unwilling to speak of this period of his career. It is also known that at one time he was custodian of some twenty thousand dollars of money, which he intended to take eastward across the Alleghanies for the purchase of lands. He was robbed, and hence carried to his grave the bitter sense that he had, through no fault of his own, been unable to carry out a trust that had been imposed on him. Yet, be these things as they may, the fact remains that he did again bring his family to his chosen settlement on the Kentucky River.

Meantime the Northern savages, under their own leaders, under the leadership of British officers, under the leadership of the dangerous renegades, Girty and McKee, came down time and again on the Kentucky settlements. The salt parties must go out as before, and in one of these excursions Squire Boone, Daniel’s beloved older brother, fell a victim to the savages. In the celebrated and ill-fated McGary fight—the blackest battle of all Kentucky—a son of Daniel Boone’s fell with the flower of the frontier. Again and again the tribes came raging down, the Cherokees, the Pottawatamies, the Shawanese, all joining hands to wipe these settlements from the face of the earth. In the fight at Bryant’s Station, little as it was, thirty of the savages were left on the field.

The year 1781 was one of wrath for the thin firing line on the western side of the Divide. All the fights and the fighters centered about or came from the “Dark and Bloody Ground.” Clark, Hardin, Harmar—all these started from Kentucky, and by reason of Kentucky. It was General Scott with one thousand Kentuckians that avenged the horrible defeat of St. Clair, killed two hundred of the victorious savages, and took back from them their booty. In the seven years from 1783 to 1790 there were fifteen hundred whites killed or taken captive in the state of Kentucky. In all these affairs, we may be sure, Daniel Boone held his full and manly part. He had drunk the war-drink of the savages during his captivity, and the spirit of the savage had entered into him.

Yet Boone was simple and unpretentious as any leader that ever lived. Once Simon Kenton, himself a hardy soul, set out with some friends on a little hunt from the station at Boonesborough. They were fired upon by Indians from ambush. One man was shot down by the Indians within seventy yards of the stockade. His murderer would have scalped him had not Kenton dropped him, a corpse beside a corpse. Then it was general mêlée until Daniel Boone and ten others came out from the stockade to assist their fighting comrades. Kenton killed another Indian, and then there came a rush. Boone directed a charge upon the savages, but was shot down, a ball breaking his leg. Kenton, brave fellow that he was, shot down Boone’s assailant and carried Boone safely into the fort. As he lay on the couch receiving attention for the leg broken by the ball, Boone sent for Kenton and said: “Well, Simon, you have behaved like a man to-day. Indeed you are a fine fellow.” That was all there was to it. They made no great parade in those days. There was no proclamation in the public places. There were no illustrated newspapers, no gifted war correspondents to describe the heroism of that time. A similar act to-day would have made both participants famous, would perhaps have won for both a Victoria Cross, and would have afforded imaginative correspondents excellent opportunity. The West had no Victoria Crosses, nor needed any.

In times of such continual excitement and danger it is small wonder that there has been but scant record kept of individual deeds of daring. Boone himself was not wont to boast of his own prowess, and regarding his deeds of arms there are not many authentic anecdotes.

One of the best known of his adventures was that in which he met two savages in the forest while he himself was alone. Those were flint-lock days, and Boone was, according to the story, able, by watching the flash of the first savage’s rifle, to throw himself out of the way of the bullet. This manœuver he repeated with the second Indian. Then he calmly shot one Indian dead with his rifle, closed with the other, received a blow of his tomahawk on his own rifle barrel, and killed the savage with his knife. A statue commemorating this feat was later placed above the south door of the rotunda in the Capitol at Washington.

There was need in Boone’s case of fortitude, not only of the physical but of the moral sort. In 1792 Kentucky, which had formerly been a county of the state of Virginia, was set up as a state by itself, with courts, jails, judges, lawyers and all the appurtenances of the artificial civilization that Boone had hoped to leave forever behind him.

Then came lawsuits regarding the lapping titles. Daniel Boone, his blue eyes troubled and bewildered, found himself among the haggling officials of the law courts. It broke his heart. Stunned but not protesting, he gave up that beautiful land he had enabled all these others to find and to hold. He was old now, and had fought the main fight of his life only to find himself the loser.

He left now for the mouth of the great Kanawha, but found the hunting poor. A son of his had crossed the Mississippi River and sent back word that there was still a West, still a country where were buffalo and elk, where were otter and beaver in the streams. There was to be one more pilgrimage for Daniel Boone, a pilgrimage down the Ohio River, ending in the region, still wilderness, not far from the point that is now the city of St. Louis. Bear in mind that this latter point was not within the United States. Daniel Boone was an emigrant from the land he had founded. He was going now out from under the infant Stars and Stripes.

In token of his character, the Spanish governor of Louisiana gave Boone some sort of trifling commission. He was made commandant or syndic, an official with about the same importance as a country justice of the peace to-day. By the terms of his settlement in that country Boone was entitled to a tract of something like ten thousand acres of land. He was wrongly informed that, as he was an officer of the state, he need not settle nor improve his land. Once more a fatal mistake for the man who knew the book of nature better than the printed page.

Late in his life we find the American government, now reaching its control over this trans-Missouri country, taking up the question of Boone’s tract of land and allowing him, with extreme generosity, one-tenth of that which by every right and title of justice ought to have been his own in fee simple in return for what he had done for the civilization of America. This was the poor pittance that Daniel Boone, one of the great Americans, was able to hand down to his posterity.

With this poor heritage go the few incidents of a meager and in some cases uncertain personal history, the main facts of which have been given above. There is even uncertainty, or rather discrepancy, regarding the date of his death. One writer states that he died at the age of eighty-four, in the year 1818. The date of his death was really September twenty-sixth, 1820, he being at that time eighty-six years of age.

In his later years Boone kept up those practices that had endeared themselves to him in his earlier lifetime. In a mild way he was a trapper, and always he was a hunter. Even when he had passed his eightieth year he went regularly each fall in pursuit of the deer, the turkey, the elk or the furred animals, or followed his simple pastime of squirrel hunting, in which he was very expert. It was his custom on these excursions to exact a promise from his attendant that, in case of his death, his body should be properly cared for. He long kept his coffin under his bed at his home, near Charette, Missouri. Once, taken sick in camp, he marked out the place for his grave, and told his negro servant (some say his Indian friend or servant) what should be done with his body.

From this indisposition, however, he recovered, and went on several other hunts later. Failing gradually, though not from any specific disease, Boone met the great and final enemy with the same fortitude that had been with him all his life. He had said farewell to all earthly ambitions, and was ready to die when the time might come. He kept the coffin under his bed not in any bravado, but in a simple wish for complete preparedness. His personal habits remained sweet and simple as of old.

Boone seems to have wandered a little farther to the West than his home near St. Louis. It is said that he “saw the mouth of the Kansas River,” and that he noted, with the impatient longing of an old man, the passing up-stream, into the mysterious Northwest, of those early parties of fur traders, the voyagers who were now heading the far Western American migration. It was now too late in the closing years. It is said that he trapped on the Kaw and the Osage, and he is said to have made one journey “up the Missouri, and to have reached the mouth of the Yellowstone”, whence he was driven back by savages.

His sons and grandsons were figures in Western history, always frontiersmen, travelers. A granddaughter became the wife of a governor of Oregon. His grandson, Kit Carson, was to hold fast the family traditions on many a Western trail; but there were to be no more trails for Daniel Boone. Overtaken once more by America, once more surrounded by the civilization from which he had by choice always alienated himself, he at length lay down peacefully to his final sleep beneath the trees.