Boone: A Biography (52 page)

Because of his reputation as a hunter and guide, a man of integrity and an officer of the militia, the builder of Boone’s Trace, over which more settlers were streaming every day, Boone was in a position of power and wealth and influence. For some men, such as Isaac Shelby, the tavern, warehouse, and surveying business would have been stepping stones to even greater wealth, a governorship, a general’s commission, a seat in the United States Senate when Kentucky became a state in 1792, a great mansion in Louisville when the settlement at the Falls
became a city, or a plantation in the region around Lexington. For a woodsman like Boone, no such security and prosperity awaited.

Boone’s world was the wilderness, and the families at the edge of the wilderness. Almost all his best work was done in the woods. The forest was the meeting place between white and Indian culture, where the two worlds challenged each other and mingled, mirrored, and merged. Boone’s genius was at its best in that complex, evolving zone, part Indian, part white, mostly natural. While he claimed to have never been lost in the woods, he was often lost when he came out of the woods, into politics, law courts, commercial enterprise. He was at home with trees around him, and animals and stars, and Indians. He lost his way where the trace became a turnpike, the trail became a street. The town was a foreign country.

By settling at Limestone Boone positioned himself at the meeting place of river traffic and overland travel. Limestone was the spot where those who had floated down the river from Pittsburgh or Redstone needed to trade boats and eastern goods and cash for horses, tools, and supplies for the journey into the interior. They also needed information about settlements and land, about routes and the danger from Indians. No one knew more about Kentucky than Boone, and no one was more famous for knowing Kentucky. Going to see Colonel Boone was a good place to start if you wanted to settle or invest in Kentucky. There was no reason he should not make a fortune, while so many with half his achievements were getting rich in the world he had helped explore and open. The fortune was lying in plain sight to be made. In his new enterprises Boone left the woods, returning to the forests and cane lands only with his surveying crews to mark boundaries, point out old haunts. He passed the jug around among his men and recounted his exploits in the early days, and they admired him. He acquired more land than he knew what to do with. He sometimes did not bother to properly register the titles to some of the land he surveyed. Mere paperwork could always be taken care of later. That was work for lawyers
and clerks. He was Daniel Boone, and he did the things that attracted him and excited him.

He was the leading citizen of Limestone, maybe the leading citizen of Kentucky, if it came to that. He had earned the right to affluence and ease. He wanted to give presents of land to his many children and foster children when they married, following the example of his father before him. He still hunted for sport from time to time, but he had moved into town. He had come out of the mother wilderness to take his place in the larger father world.

At the tavern where Boone lived and worked, Rebecca ran the kitchen, probably with the help of her daughter Rebecca Boone Goe. The son-in-law Philip Goe already had a reputation as a drunk, but even so, Boone put much of his business in Goe’s hands. That fact alone suggests Boone’s lack of care with business. Family unity was more important than practicality and profit.

The new prosperity and status of the Boones is shown by the tax rolls of 1787, where the family is listed as owning seven slaves. The slaves very likely served in the tavern, as well as in the store and warehouse, and perhaps on the surveying crew. Though some writers have tried to argue that Boone disapproved of slavery, there is little evidence for the argument. In the prosperous years in Limestone, slaves were very much a part of his household and his business. In this period of his life Boone got far indeed from his Quaker upbringing.

Beautifully placed on the river though it was, the town of Limestone was probably not much to brag about. As late as 1792 James Taylor from Virginia described it as “
a muddy hole of a place
with two or three log houses and a tavern.” Another traveler described the riverfront: “
In this harbour are seen
a few Kentucky boats, generally laying near the mouth [of the creek], many of which have been broken up to form those straggling houses which are perceived on the bank.” He referred to Limestone as “
the fag [worn out] end of Kentuckey
.” In the boom economy of Kentucky around 1786 there was an intoxication and expansiveness. Fortunes were made quickly, and lost quickly. It was like a gold rush,
except the gold was the land itself. Everyone was buying. Investors from the east and Europe bought up great tracts of land and sold them off in parcels through agents such as Boone and never laid eyes or foot on the property themselves. Everyone needed their claims located and surveyed. Boone kept a crew of rodmen and chainmen busy surveying for his clients. Tradition says that he kept them well supplied with “Old Monongahela.” He was a popular man. An official surveyor, he was also a colonel in the militia, sheriff, and county coroner. With these duties added to all his tavern keeping, store keeping, horse trading, horse breeding, warehousing duties, one has the impression of someone seriously overextended. He had too many irons in the fire to keep a close eye on any one. According to Neal O. Hammon, “
[In 1783] he made 24 surveys
and covered 17,305 acres.”

The enterprise with the largest legal and commercial ramifications was land. In the beginning, exact boundary lines probably didn’t seem to matter. There was so much land a few acres here or a few there didn’t make a lot of difference. Certainly a few hundred feet in either direction didn’t seem all that significant. But as more and more land was bought and cleared, surveyed and sold, and sold again, boundary lines and accurate plats became important. It has been said that Boone’s competence as a surveyor was about average for his time. But the standards of the time were fairly low. As deputy surveyor Boone had the authority to lay out tracts and make plats and register them in the county deed office. With few instruments except a chain and a compass, a surveyor like Boone, with little knowledge of trigonometry or geometry, depended largely on landmarks, a stream, a hill, a boulder, a big tree. In the style of surveying called metes and bounds, a surveyor ran a line from a landmark in the direction of a compass reading. One obvious weakness of the method was that the stream might shift, the tree die or be confused with another tree, the boulder be lost. Another was that the compass reading might shift over time as the magnetic pole moved. Less important for a short line, such a shift or mistaken reading could make a significant difference with a boundary miles in
length. Boone lacked the equipment and training to set his callings by the North Star.

Hammon tells us, “
A surveying party would need a compass
and Boone’s assistants may have used a chain for measurements, but some frontier chainmen reported using a buffalo tug or grapevine (supposedly cut to the proper distance).” If a surveyor such as Boone was lucky, he was surveying on level ground. Things got more complicated in rough terrain with thickets, ravines, the rise and fall of ridges, or if he had to calculate acreage along an uneven boundary such as a stream or bluff. A deed might say that a property ran “to the top of the hill.” Deciding later where the top of the hill was would be an act of interpretation, within a range of several yards, especially if the hill was long or heavily wooded. Boone probably had neither the equipment nor training to practice the technique of leveling, to calculate the rise and fall of land.

It was easier if a surveyor had an adjoining property line and a deed, or best of all a map, to survey from. This method was called butts and bounds. The accuracy of a survey is greatly enhanced if the surveyor has an established “corner” to start from, a location that is already known in a deed as the boundary of adjoining property. With a certain corner and careful compass readings a competent surveyor has a chance of making a fairly accurate survey. And if a surveyor was really skilled and careful he might even take a reading from the North Star, establishing a permanent angle of direction from the corner. One of the most competent surveyors in Kentucky at the time was considered to be John Floyd.
Yet later studies of his surveys
found that his acreage counts were often off by as much as 15 percent.

In the heady times of early Kentucky settlement, it may never have occurred to Boone that more cautious methods should be followed. After all, surveyors elsewhere seemed to be doing as he did. Some surveyors couldn’t read, much less calculate acreage accurately. And even those who could read jotted down callings such as “from the big sycamore to bend in Stinking Creek.” The worst were what were called
chimney corner surveyors, those who wrote up plats without ever going into the field or compiled maps from sketchy or fictitious notes. It was a time when even honest men operated by methods that would later be considered fraudulent. “All Boone’s entries were mighty vague,” William Risk later recalled. Yet there is little evidence that Boone’s surveys were any more vague than those of his contemporaries.

By the time Kentucky became a state in 1792, many of the land claims were still overlapped. The Virginia land office far back in Richmond, without accurate maps of the region, had granted warrants for more land than actually existed in the Bluegrass. The greed and carelessness of the first decade created work for ambitious lawyers for decades to come. Over that period the Great Meadow would cease to be a land of buffalo and hunters and become a land of lawyers, politicians and accountants, slave owners and hemp planters. However much he might come to hate that change, Boone was as much to blame as any other single human being.

Yet in the mid-1780s Boone seemed to prosper. In spite of his imaginative spelling, he kept up an enormous correspondence with clients and would-be clients. His holdings multiplied and compounded. That he knew the land best as a hunting ground, rather than as real estate, never seemed to occur to anyone, maybe not even him. Boone relied on his son-in-law Will Hays in much of his land business. He used his profits from surveying to buy more land. But as his holdings increased it became more and more essential to survey and register deeds properly, to defend titles with documents and by legal process, even going to court. In these years of boom and prosperity he accumulated a pyramid of shingled holdings and uncertain claims that were more liabilities than assets. And rather than see his claims secured by due process, he preferred to keep moving on to others, selling what he had cheap and buying dear. He was carried along by the momentum of the new economy and frenzy that swept the region after the Revolution ended, and like someone caught up in a flood, he could neither go back nor step aside to safer ground.

1786–1788

While Boone grew more and more deeply entangled in his surveying and business ventures, the problems with Indians had not disappeared. The Shawnees and other tribes had moved some of their towns farther north and west, but they still crossed the river into Kentucky and raided settlements. As a leading citizen of the territory, Boone worked to keep things calm along the river. He wrote to the governor of Virginia asking for more reinforcements for the militia. “
A Deale of Sine is Seen in Different places
, in purtikular Limeston,” he warned Patrick Henry. “An Inden Warr is Expcted.” George Rogers Clark, commander of the Kentucky militia, was still far away in Louisville, and the forts to protect the Bluegrass region had not been built.

One chief of the Shawnees was Moluntha, whom Boone had known since his days of captivity at Chillicothe. Several tribes signed a peace agreement with the American government at Fort MacIntosh just down the river from Limestone in January of 1785. A year later Moluntha and the Shawnees made their own treaty with the Americans. But even as the treaty was being signed, parties from Kentucky were crossing the river to steal Indian horses. When Boone tried to persuade them to return the horses, he met so much opposition he gave it up. No doubt he was suspected of disloyalty, because of his old ties
with the Shawnees. As an official and popular authority figure, Boone had to act with diplomacy and caution.

Many Shawnees and members of other tribes were angry at Moluntha for ceding lands in southern Ohio to the Americans, and they continued raids into Kentucky.
In April 1786 Moluntha and the chief named the Shade
asked the British for help, stating that the American treaty makers had deceived them about their real intentions. Both Boone and Levi Todd asked the government of Virginia for aid in repelling the attacks and securing the lands along the Ohio River. Angry residents of Kentucky were demanding separation from Virginia and the creation of a new state that could defend itself.

Finally, Gen. George Rogers Clark, on his own initiative, planned another offensive against the Indians in Ohio. He called for Col. Benjamin Logan to attack the Shawnee towns at the head of the Mad River, a tributary of the Miami, while Clark himself led a larger force against the villages on the Wabash. Hearing of the planned campaign, the Shawnees sent four hundred warriors to the defense of the Wabash villages, leaving their own towns relatively undefended.

On September 29, 1786, Logan led eight hundred Kentuckians across the Ohio, with Boone heading one of the battalions. Boone must have swallowed some pride to serve under one of the men who had brought charges of treason against him at the court-martial in 1778. He demonstrated again and again in his long life that he did not hold grudges. It took the large force a week to reach the Shawnee towns, now farther to the north and west of Old Chillicothe and Piqua.
Simon Girty, who was with the Shawnees
, later reported that when the Kentucky militia arrived, the Indians raised an American flag to show they had changed their loyalties with the end of the Revolution. In fact, the militia had trouble finding the villages at all. Marching farther and farther north into the very flat country of central western Ohio, they searched for days for signs of the Indians. Finally a pack of dogs was spotted, and Boone said to follow the dogs and
the dogs would lead
them to the villages, which they did. After seven days of marching the Kentuckians were angry and hungry. Whether the Shawnees raised the American flag or not, the militia plunged in for the attack and most of the Indians fled.