Read Boone: A Biography Online
Authors: Robert Morgan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #Adventurers & Explorers
Boone: A Biography (12 page)
Rebecca and Daniel, like others on the Yadkin, decided to retreat to Virginia until the Indian troubles quieted down. Squire and Sarah Boone, and their three unmarried children, Squire, Edward, and Hannah, accompanied Daniel and Rebecca, and Elizabeth Boone Grant and her husband, William. They moved all the way to Culpeper County, Virginia, and stayed with friends.
For several months Daniel worked as a teamster in Virginia, hauling tobacco to market and supplies back to the farm. His first daughter, Susannah, was born November 2, 1760. Though Boone may have been initiated as a Freemason in 1755, his return to Virginia in 1760 also provided an opportunity for joining the brotherhood. An important lodge had already been established in nearby Fredericksburg, and there are rumors that the Boones met George Washington in Fredericksburg also. It is possible his father, Squire, became a Freemason at this time also, or renewed his Masonic connections begun earlier in Pennsylvania.
With mother and daughter doing well, Boone left for North Carolina because it was time for fall hunting and the beginning of trapping season. In all his long life Daniel never missed a hunt if he could help it, even if the Indians were on the warpath and, later, even if he was
supposedly sitting for a session of the Virginia legislature. It is likely that Boone also rejoined the Waddell militia the next spring, after the hunt was over and the hides and furs sold. In 1760 Waddell’s forces invaded several Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee River. In a bloody campaign the militia murdered and scalped women as well as men. On November 19, 1761, the Cherokees agreed to peace terms at the Long Island of the Holston, and things were quieter in the Carolina backcountry for a while.
DOMESTIC ARTS
I
T IS HARD FOR US
in the twenty-first century to imagine a wife’s burden on the frontier when her husband was away hunting. Gathering fodder, threshing wheat and rye, carrying grain to mill, and shucking corn, was the heavy work that fell to women. And when there was no heavy work to be done outside, they spun thread from wool or flax, wove cloth, tanned buckskin.
Women on the frontier did all the scrubbing and scouring and washing. There were always dirty diapers and underclothes, night clothes and petticoats. With dirt floors and mud in the yard, smoke and ashes from the fireplace, sweat in the summertime, outer clothes needed laundering also.
A woman had to gather enough wood to heat water in an iron wash pot, water that had to be carried from a spring or stream or well. Once the fire was going and the pot steaming, the woman soaked the clothes and scrubbed them on a washboard or beat them with a stick. The fabric was wrung out by hand and rinsed in cold water and wrung out once more. Washed clothes were draped over bushes, hung from limbs, or strung on cords to dry.
The only soap was what she made herself from fat and lye. To this end she scraped ashes out of the fireplace and piled them in wooden ash hoppers, V-shaped troughs with a crack at the bottom. Straw or grass in the trough acted as a strainer. When the hopper was full she poured water over the ashes, and the liquid that leached through the hopper was lye, or “ley.” The lye was boiled in a large kettle until it was thick enough to float an egg. The woman saved fat from her cooking, the drippings of meat and bear bacon. When the fatty oils were mixed with lye, the alkali in the lye acted on the fat to make the metal salts that are soap, with a side product of glycerol. With salt added to the brew, soap in the form of light curds floated to the surface of the alcohol. When the liquid was drained off and the curds washed with a salt solution, the mixture was allowed to settle. The upper layer, as it hardened, was the pure soap, called settled soap which could be chipped or flaked, broken into bars.
For tanning hides, women gathered oak bark in late winter when it was full of sap and cut it up and pounded it so the tannic acid seeped out into a water-filled trough. When the solution was strong enough, hides were soaked for at least a month. Deer hides were softened by drawing them back and forth across a straking board in a process called graining. Indian women often soaked deerskins in dung and urine to make them soft.
We know little about the sanitary facilities of cabins, forts, and stations. Early accounts do not mention such things. The outhouse, as we know it, had not been
invented at this time. Most likely, settlers just went out into the woods or used a chamber pot at night, if they had one.
But at a fort where upward of a hundred people were enclosed in palisades, some kind of facility must have been a necessity. Likely it was a hut or shed constructed against the wall of a stockade, a pit in the ground, or a ditch. In hot weather lime could be thrown in a latrine to neutralize the stench. We do know chamber pots were sometimes emptied from the blockhouses onto attacking Indians.
It was a great improvement when a cabin was given a puncheon floor made of logs split in two and laid flat side up. Settlers would sprinkle fine white sand from branches onto the puncheons. When the sand got dirtied with tobacco juice, ashes, mud, or dripped grease, the covering could be swept away and replaced with more clean sand.
With neither metal nor ceramics, the settlers had to rely on wooden spoons and carved bowls.
William Clinkenbeard
, an early settler in Kentucky, told John Dabney Shane that when he and his wife married at Boonesborough they had no spoons, dishes, or any other utensils. Luckily William Poage, who arrived in Kentucky in 1779, was a fine craftsman in wood. “
Noggins hollowed out of knots
of trees served as cups. [Poage] also carved piggins (small wooden pails with one stave extended upward as a handle), trenchers (wooden platters for serving food).”
The preferred yard around a cabin was bare ground. Weeds and grass were cut away. Snakes were easier to spot on bare ground, and children were safer. Women tied switches together to make rough brooms called besoms with which to sweep the ground and scoured away chicken piles and other stains with kettles of hot water splashed on the dirt. A swept yard sparkled and when flowers and shrubs were planted at the edges became an island of beauty and order in the threatening wilderness.
Women Carrying Buckets at Bryan’s Station
. From Elizabeth S. Kinkead,
History of Kentucky
, 1896. Though the story has been questioned by historians, eyewitnesses told of white women, children, and slaves boldly going outside the fort to get water early on the morning of August 16, 1782, as Indians surrounded Bryan’s Station. (Courtesy Kentucky Historical Society.)
In Search of the Real West
1760–1768
Between 1760 and 1769 Daniel Boone, still a young man, was attempting to define himself. It is an odd fact that those who accomplish the most often spend years fumbling and stumbling to find what it is they can achieve. The first half of a life may be given to experiment, trial and error, failure after failure. If Boone had a sense of his destiny at the time, it was frustrated again and again by false starts, dead ends, detours, and digressions. While his fame as a hunter grew, his debts also grew. Though he seemed to have had a sense of his calling from his youth, he must have suffered serious doubts about the exact nature of the call, his purpose, his future. The decade of the 1760s could be called a time of wandering in the wilderness for Boone, in a metaphoric as well as a literal sense. It might be said he was auditioning for parts in the unfolding story of his life and times.
In Rowan County’s
Minutes, Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions
the following entry can be found: “
A Deed of Gift from Squire Boone
and Sarah his wife to Daniel Boone his son for 640 acres of Land 18th Day of October 1759. Proved by Thomas Banfield.” Squire apparently gave two of his married sons each a square mile of land. And while Daniel may have farmed on that property, it appears he and Rebecca continued to live in the cabin on Sugartree Creek. With that much land of his own he may have been expected to give up hunting and settle down to a farming life, but nothing could have been further from his plans.
Around 1760 Boone began to go on longer and longer hunts into the Blue Ridge Mountains to the north and west of the Yadkin and to the valleys beyond the Blue Ridge. It was Cherokee country and hunters had to be discreet, never calling attention to themselves, building small campfires in hidden coves, behind rocks and logs, leaving little evidence that they had been there. The ideal was to slip into the valleys as silent and unseen as an Indian, extract the hides and bear meat, beaver and mink and otter pelts, and withdraw again. The best hunting was always on Indian land, and Boone became an expert at infiltrating, spying, and harvesting the bounty there.
According to one account the Cherokees found Boone’s tracks one day in the region that would later be Washington County, Tennessee. Discovering he was being followed, he turned away from his camp and ducked behind a waterfall. Concealed by the curtain of water, he waited as the Indians puzzled over his tracks that disappeared into the creek and never emerged. They decided
he had been turned into a ghost
that haunted the place and they fled the scene. The creek was later named Boone Creek and the falls Boone Falls.
Beyond the Blue Ridge were the Alleghenies, called the Unakas by the Cherokees, meaning White Mountains, because of the haze over the peaks much of the year. Later they would be called the Smokies. For a hunter in the 1760s who was willing to risk the danger from Cherokees and roving bands of Chickasaws, and Shawnees from north of the Ohio, the mountains offered unlimited opportunities for taking furs and hides, for meat and adventure and sheer beauty.
“
I have often heard Father speak
of hunting in the Smoky, Brushy and Little Mountains, and also Pilot Mountain,” Nathan Boone said. “While hunting in and passing over these mountains he would never consider he had discovered the real west, which was Kentucky.”
By then Boone had become a commercial hunter. The idea was to return from these long hunts with a packhorse carrying more than a hundred deer hides or two hundred or three hundred beaver pelts,
worth enough to sustain a family for a year and buy a new rifle, powder, lead, steel traps, a horse.
A beaver skin was a unit
of value, same as a pound sterling or a silver dollar. But for Boone and many of the men he knew, these long hunts were from the beginning much more than business. They were voyages of exploration and discovery. The hunters were driven by a craving and curiosity, a lust for wonder and wandering. The wilderness was like a beautiful woman that must be pursued and loved. And it is likely the danger was part of the attraction. A wilderness without Indians would seem bland, hardly a wilderness at all. And Boone may have sensed, even then, that when the Indians were gone from a region the game would soon be gone also.
Boone sought oneness with the wilderness as a mystic seeks union with the creator or a lover yearns to merge with the beloved. The feminist critic Annette Kolodny has described Boone’s passion for the wilderness as a male fantasy of “privatized erotic mastery.” “
The isolate woodland son
, enjoying a presexual—but nonetheless eroticized—intimacy within the embraces of the American forest.” Kolodny goes on to distinguish the desire of men for wildness and exploitation of the virgin wild from the desire of women for a home.
One of Boone’s companions on these long hunts was his neighbor Nathaniel Gist, son of Christopher Gist, scout for the first Ohio Company and for George Washington’s expeditions into the backcountry. Nathaniel Gist would later marry a Cherokee woman and become, according to some, the father of the great Cherokee inventor Sequoya, who developed the Cherokee alphabet. But in December of 1760 Gist was hunting in the Brushy Mountains just west of the Yadkin with Boone. It was at this time that they met a slave named Burrell who served as a cowherd near the head of the Watauga River for one of the settlers. Burrell lived to be over a hundred years old, and around 1845 he told a boy named Thomas Isbell that he had guided Daniel Boone to the cabin
built earlier for herders
on his first trip across the Blue Ridge.