Boone: A Biography (54 page)

Throughout the 1780s Boone got deeper and deeper in debt, as he had to sell off land at dirt cheap prices just to pay his taxes, and he became embroiled in ever more lawsuits, mostly brought against him. He rarely went to court himself. Between 1786 and 1789 he was involved in at least ten lawsuits. He was sued for his contested surveys, lost titles, signatures on others’ debts. Boone sometimes found it difficult to collect his fees for surveying. On July 17, 1785, he wrote a client, Nathaniel Rochester, “
Sir, I must be plain with you
. I am entirely out of cash and the chain men and Markers must be paid on the spot and I want 2 or 3 guineas for my own use. Sir, if you will send me six guineas by my little son it shall be settled on our first meeting, by Sir, your humble servant. Daniel Boone.”

Historians, including Arthur K. Moore
, have pointed out that heroes such as Boone were essential to the settlement of the frontier, but once the wilderness and Indians were gone the society had little use for the men themselves. It was the legend that was important.

It is painful to consider a man of Boone’s talents and predilections enmeshed in such a labyrinth of debt, litigation, recrimination. Boone the hunter and explorer, the scout and visionary, was now bogged down in chicanery and greed, debt and con men. In spite of his fame and earlier successes, he had sunk to the level of horse trader and, apparently, even slave trader. The woodsman who had sought and loved the paradise of the wilderness, the Eden of Kentucky, had been swept along into the land boom with the worst of society. “
It is apparent that without wealth
, breeding, and education, the backwoodsmen fitted little better than the Indians and varmints into such a setting,” Arthur K. Moore observed. Boone went along with the new times, but he did
not change with the new age. He was still willing to divide what he had among his friends and associates, as he had back in his hunting days. Boone had failed himself and by doing so had failed many others also. His debts were beginning to outrun his assets and income.

Because of his Quaker upbringing, his respect for Indians, his peaceable nature, it is surprising that Boone accepted slavery so easily, owned slaves when he could afford them, and even traded in slaves. One would have thought that his experience as a captive of the Shawnees might have made him more sensitive to the issue of bondage, that his sense of fairness and honor would have led him to oppose slavery. It is a disturbing truth that even the best people tend to accept what they are familiar with, what they see practiced day after day around them.

Daniel Drake, who was brought to Kentucky as a boy around this time, was a lifelong opponent of slavery, in his career as a doctor. In his memoirs he left an account of a neighbor in Kentucky that reminds us of the reality of slavery on the frontier:

This man had a wife older
and proportionably larger than himself, with two or three little children. He was very poor, and yet owned a negro man in middle life, and a woman rather old, at least twice the age of himself. His treatment of both was cruel in the extreme. A single pair of the flimsiest negro shoes was all the man got in the year, and the old woman was quite as miserably clothed. They were fed on stinted diet. Both worked in the field, and were pushed under the whip to the extremest degree. Its use on the man did not excite our feelings so much as that on the old woman. She had been his nurse in infancy, and yet he would tie her up, strip her back naked, and whip her with a cowhide till the blood would flow to her feet, and her screams would reach our ears at the distance of more than three hundred yards. Of course, we were greatly delighted when he left us.

Because he was Col. Daniel Boone, and because he knew the land better than anyone else, and because he was an official of Fayette
County, Boone was called on to testify again and again in hearings and trials. Since someone lost in every suit, Boone came to be hated by many. After being the greatest hero of Kentucky in 1784, by the late 1780s Boone was despised by scores of settlers for their losses and embarrassments. Rumors of the earlier accusations of his disloyalty still circulated. The descendants of Richard Callaway never tired of accusing Boone of treason in 1778. A number of times his life was threatened. His son Nathan later told Draper, “
In addition to premeditated personal injury
, he felt he was a target for assassination.” Nothing hurt his feelings as much as accusations of dishonesty. Boone was especially sensitive to slights upon his character, in a place and time where such sensitivity was a liability.

Any business that took his mind away from the controversies and lawsuits of the land business would have been welcome. As a county official experienced in Indian affairs, Boone was called upon to negotiate with the Shawnees for the release of the prisoners he had been boarding on his property. In effect, Boone was the Indian agent in the area for the state of Virginia. In February 1787 he supplied two prisoners, a French Canadian and his Indian wife, with horses and provisions and sent them to the Shawnee towns to the north with an offer to exchange prisoners. In March, Captain Johnny, the new main chief after the death of Moluntha, brought three captive white children to Limestone to show his good faith. Chief Noamohouoh, who came with the delegation, declared that the Shawnees wanted nothing but peace, but he demanded that Queen Nonhelema be released from the keep in Danville, Kentucky, and Boone agreed to the request.

But Col. Benjamin Logan was not pleased with Boone’s promise, and Col. Robert Patterson, who had Nonhelema in his charge, would not give her up. An angry exchange of letters passed between Boone and Patterson. Patterson had served as captain under Boone’s command in the Fayette County militia at the Battle of the Blue Licks. Boone offered to take responsibility for the transaction. He had given his word to the Shawnee chief. “
I flater myself [that you will] Send
the Indian woman with the bearer,” Boone wrote to Patterson. Finally Patterson did give up the Queen, but Boone’s friendliness and ease in dealing with Indians always made him suspect among his fellow officers. In this case, Logan and Patterson may have been reluctant to hand over their most valuable prisoner without anything in return except the three white children and Noamohouoh’s promise of peace. However, Logan clearly respected Boone’s honesty, and each of Boone’s expense accounts for boarding Indian prisoners was duly signed by Logan and forwarded on to the capital in Richmond.

In April 1787 a Shawnee chief named Captain Wolf arrived with nine American captives to be traded for Shawnees. In late August, Captain Johnny came to the north bank of the Ohio River with seventy-five warriors and a number of white prisoners and sent word across the river to Limestone where, Ted Franklin Belue tells us, “
the Shawnees often ferried across to visit
their beloved white brother, Sheltowee, and buy whiskey and supplies.” Boone crossed the river to negotiate with him. The Shawnee chief explained that it had taken him two months to round up the prisoners from the scattered Shawnee towns. Boone was accompanied by Col. Benjamin Logan, and when Captain Johnny insisted that the Shawnees only wanted peace, though they did not concede any Ohio territory to the whites, Logan told Captain Johnny that if the Shawnees did not live in peace the Americans would take their Ohio lands from them. If they kept their word the Ohio River would remain the boundary between the whites and the Indians. “Go home and live at peace, and I will assure you, no army shall march against you from Kentucke.”

Boone was at his best as liaison and diplomat, arranging the exchange of prisoners. Most of the Shawnees trusted him and he spoke their language in more senses than one. At this exchange in August 1787, wives who had been kidnapped were reunited with husbands, and children returned to parents. A girl named Chloe Flinn, who had lost her parents and had been captured by Shawnees, was taken in by Daniel and Rebecca and looked after until her kin were located in Virginia.
She never forgot Boone’s kindness
and later named a son, Boone Ballard, in his honor.

The evening after the exchange, Boone invited the Shawnees across the river for a great feast, offering them barbecue from two steers and kegs of whiskey. There was music and dancing, and Indians and whites seemed to get along well, until one Kentuckian spotted a stolen mare in the possession of a Shawnee. Far gone in his cups, the man bragged he would take the mare back for the widow, its owner, even if he had to scalp every Indian present. Boone, ever the peacemaker, with the help of Simon Kenton,
arranged to trade the mare
for a keg of whiskey and returned the horse to the widow. Present at the exchange and barbecue was a young Shawnee named Blue Jacket. It has been said that Blue Jacket was a white American who had been captured as a teenager and had chosen to live with those who had captured and adopted him.
Recent scholarship suggests that Blue Jacket
was in fact born a Shawnee. Blue Jacket became particularly good friends with Boone’s son Daniel Morgan and the two hunted together in the fall of 1787. Blue Jacket established a friendship with the whole Boone family and promised to protect Limestone residents from attacks and capture.

The next year, Blue Jacket was captured by raiders from Kentucky intent on stealing Shawnee horses. As they beat him into submission, Blue Jacket yelled, “
Boone! Boone!
” and explained he was a friend of Daniel Boone. The raiders took their prisoner to Limestone, where Boone agreed to lock him up in the cabin that served as a kind of jail. Then he invited the horse thieves to have a drink on him at the tavern.
The men all got drunk
, and during the night Blue Jacket found a knife stuck in the cabin wall, used it to cut the ropes that bound him, and escaped.

Blue Jacket rose to be a mighty chief of the Shawnees and, with Little Turtle of the Miamis, helped defeat the American armies of Harmar and St. Clair. He survived the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and lived to be an associate of Tecumseh in the next century. He always considered Daniel Boone his friend. Whatever his experience
with other white men, he never forgot Boone’s kindness and perhaps Boone’s sense of humor.

However complicated Boone’s land dealing had become, his life as a public official was not over. In the fall of 1787 he was again elected to represent his county in the Virginia legislature. Traveling to Richmond with Rebecca and Nathan, he was probably relieved to hand over his businesses to sons-in-law Will Hays and Philip Goe. In Richmond he introduced bills to create ferries on the Kentucky River and supported a resolution demanding that Britain give up its forts in the western territories. In this stint as a legislator Boone seems to have been more attentive than he had been six years earlier. Perhaps the presence of Rebecca in Richmond encouraged him to be more active in his office. Perhaps with age he saw his responsibilities in a new way.

O
NE OF THE
legends about Boone is that in 1788 he and his sons dug “fifteen tons” of ginseng to carry up the Ohio to the eastern market. Boone had dug ginseng for the China market and traded in the root for years. Ginseng was one of the treasures of the woods, along with beaver pelts and deerskins. “
By the next spring we had some twelve or fifteen tons
, which we loaded into a keelboat, and Father started up the river with his family with him,” Nathan told Draper in 1851. Over the years, biographers and historians have repeated this story of Boone and his sons Daniel Morgan and Jesse, along with Rebecca and Nathan, poling a keelboat loaded with fifteen tons of ginseng up the Ohio and running aground on an island near Point Pleasant. Hit by a drifting log, the boat took on water. Poling the ruined cargo and damaged boat to shore, they were taken in by the Van Bibber family, whom years before Boone had rescued in a snowstorm.

It is a wonderful story, but no one ever seems to have tried to visualize how much ginseng fifteen tons would be. Ginseng, after it is dug, is dried and very light. Fifteen tons, or thirty thousand pounds, would fill a warehouse or a ship. What Boone and his sons were actually transporting was fifteen
tuns
, or barrels. And much of it had
been dug by others and sold to Boone. “
Father was busily employed in digging
ginseng. He employed several hands for this work and also bought up what he could.” In fact, a great deal of the ginseng was bought from others. In “Daniel Boone’s Account Book” we find this entry: “
Oct. 9th 1788, recd. 15 caggs of ginseng of Capt. Fagan
for Hart.” Tobacco and many other products were transported in barrels, and coopers were much in demand in frontier towns. A tun was a cask and could be different sizes, though a ton was also a measure of volume in a ship, not weight. Fifteen barrels of ginseng might well fit into a keelboat to be poled up a river. And the kegs had to be small enough to load onto packhorses at the end of the river journey for transporting to Maryland. When Nathan Boone told Draper the story, Draper simply mistook the term, and historians through the years have passed on his mistake. Also it is likely the trip up the river was made in the fall of 1788, not the spring. Nathan was recalling events that happened sixty-three years earlier, when he was only seven years old.

(Scholars have found Nathan’s testimony especially reliable, but he is not always correct. “
In the fall of 1784 we moved out of Boone’s Station
and settled his farm, a new place on Marble Creek, about five miles west of Boone’s Station,” Nathan told Draper. Nathan, who was only three years old in 1784, was almost certainly mistaken. In 1784 Filson published his map of “
Kentucke
” and located Boone near Marble Creek, not Boone’s Station. And Boone’s land was apparently not on Marble Creek itself, but only in the area.)

The story of the ginseng does, however, have a somewhat happy ending. Enjoying a renewed friendship with the Van Bibbers, the Boones repaired the keelboat and dried out as much of the cargo as they could. The Van Bibbers would befriend the Boones when they later moved to Point Pleasant, and young Nathan would marry Olive Van Bibber, a relative, eleven years later. Continuing their journey up the Ohio to Pittsburgh, and then up the Monongahela to Redstone, they loaded the kegs on packhorses and carried them over the Cumberland Road to Hagerstown, Maryland, where Boone sold the damaged ginseng to
an old acquaintance from Transylvania Company days, Thomas Hart, who had a store there. He got only half what he had hoped for.