Read Boone: A Biography Online
Authors: Robert Morgan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #Adventurers & Explorers
Boone: A Biography (55 page)
A
FTER DISPOSING
of the fifteen barrels of “sang,” while Daniel Morgan and Jesse returned to Kentucky, Boone and Rebecca and Nathan rode north to visit relatives near Oley, Pennsylvania, where Boone had grown up. Residents in Pennsylvania recalled years later that Boone stayed for several months, and while Rebecca was talkative and cheerful, Boone was quiet and dour. His son Nathan later said it was while they were visiting in Pennsylvania that his father resolved to leave Kentucky. “
Then he also decided to take up residence
at Point Pleasant and not return to Maysville [Limestone] as he had originally intended.” The accusations and lawsuits had become too much for Boone. While he was away a few months he realized just how much stress he had been living with. Rachael Lightfoot, who recalled the Boones from this visit, described him as “
dark complexioned & stern looking
—very taciturn and gloomy.” But she described Rebecca as “very pleasant and sociable and spoke very freely of their affairs and bereavement.”
This visit to the place of his birth and childhood appears to be another turning point in Boone’s life. Seeing his Quaker relations again, he may have thought how far he had strayed from the teachings of peace and tolerance. Seeing the places where he had hunted and herded cattle as a boy, he may have recalled his mother and felt the call of the woods again, and been reminded how essential a life in the wilderness was for him. It was the sensuous body of the land he loved, not the head full of numbers and laws and vexations of authority. His fame and success and the whisper of wealth and the culture of land grabbing had distracted and led him astray from what mattered to him. Back in Pennsylvania he must have seen his recent life in a hard, sober light.
From Nathan’s comments to Draper, we gather that Boone thought long and hard while resting in Pennsylvania. He was fifty-four years old, and he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life fighting lawsuits, appearing in court, answering angry clients of his land surveys and
sales. Kentucky had gotten away from him. The beavers and buffalo and Indians had been replaced by lawyers and politicians and crooks. Even the small farms were being replaced by plantations. “
In place of cane, the cabin sites were now
overgrown by hemp, the slave-produced cash crop which brought central Kentucky planters great prosperity in the antebellum era.”
B
Y
1788 the irony could not have been lost on Boone that he, as much as any other single human being, had helped create the world that was now repugnant to him, so raging and relentless in growth and greed. And he must have seen, perhaps for the first time, the contradiction and conflict at the heart of so much of his effort: to lead white people into the wilderness and make it safe for them was to destroy the very object of his quest. The paradox had been present in almost everything he had done, and yet he had ignored or misunderstood it. Whenever the recognition came to him, it must have been sobering, for he had to see that his genius and his talents virtually canceled each other out. Wherever he went, many others would follow. He wanted to enjoy and keep the object of his desire at the same time. For all his achievements and fame, his kindness and compassion, cunning and knowledge, Boone had made a fool of himself, too. He had acted the fool, and he must have come to that hard view of his life.
It was a recognition most of us come to, whatever our accomplishments and worldly success or failure. The foolishness is inherent in our nature, and few of us escape it, even if we recognize our kinks and smallnesses for what they are. As he sat in Pennsylvania and thought and thought and said little, Boone became a wiser man, and by the time he and Rebecca and Nathan returned to Kentucky he was perhaps a somewhat different man.
Once back in Kentucky, Boone began a process of selling off much of the property he had acquired and closing down a number of the businesses he had started. There were many outstanding disputes and lawsuits to deal with, but he curbed his speculation in land. He continued
to do some surveying, but on a smaller scale. He turned over his land business to son-in-law Will Hays, and his store and tavern were to be managed by Philip Goe. He was scaling back, giving up the expansive, entrepreneurial ambition and intoxication that had ruined him.
It was Point Pleasant at the mouth of the Kanawha River that attracted. The Van Bibbers lived there, and he needed friendly faces. The rivers appealed to him, both the Kanawha and the Ohio, and the mountains of that part of western Virginia were less settled than much of Kentucky.
While he prepared for the move to Point Pleasant during the fall and winter and into the spring of 1789, Boone and his sons spent much time hunting and gathering ginseng. They probably looked for the herb while hunting deer in summer and early fall. Once dug, the roots had to be dried and packed in barrels. Boone also bought a number of horses, which Jesse and Daniel Morgan drove over the mountains to sell in Hagerstown. Besides European breeds of draft and saddle horses, some of these mounts may have been Indian ponies. Choctaw ponies were one of the special breeds of frontier Kentucky.
Some of the horses in the region
were of Spanish origin, brought up from the nations in the south and west, and some were brought from Canada.
In 1789 Boone loaded another keelboat with kegs of ginseng and he and Rebecca and Nathan poled up the river again. But when they met Jesse and Daniel Morgan at Redstone, Boone was told the bottom had dropped out of the ginseng market. He would hardly cover his costs on that trip, and he also found out a number of the horses he had sent to Maryland had been lost in the rough mountain country of Virginia.
Boone could not be blamed if he decided there was a jinx on his business ventures. Almost every business he attempted failed. He could not seem to transfer his skill and cleverness in the woods and his charisma with people into a profitable line of work. Perhaps he gave up too quickly on some ventures or gave in too easily to adversity. Perhaps his heart was not really in a lot of his enterprises in this period.
But the harder he worked the less his efforts seemed to succeed. He spent much of 1789 hauling freight and passengers in his keelboat on the Ohio. Every day one could see flatboats and keelboats, rafts and canoes, on
la belle rivière
. Around 1788 to 1789 Boone and his family were a part of this river traffic, poling, rowing, sometimes sailing on the big water artery that brought more immigrants by the day if not the hour.
The story of Boone’s failure in Kentucky was the story of many first explorers and settlers. By 1789 he knew his health and happiness lay in the wilderness, and he determined to return there. He was fifty-five years old, and he had suffered from fifteen tons of bad luck. But he was ready to make another move, a new beginning. And so in the fall of 1789 he moved to Point Pleasant.
BOATING IN THE WEST
THOUGH BOONE WAS MOST
famous for hacking out the trace that later became known as the Wilderness Road, he, like most frontiersmen of his day, was also a navigator of rivers. Having acquired his own keelboat around 1788, he plied the Ohio between Limestone and Point Pleasant in Virginia, and as far upstream as Pittsburgh and beyond, to Redstone on the Monongahela.
The smallest crafts used in the wilderness were the canoe and bull boat, both of which originated with the Indians. A bull boat was constructed from “bull” buffalo hides stitched together and sealed with resin, then stretched over a wooden frame. Shawnees used them mostly to ferry across rivers such as the Ohio. They carried the boat hides with them, and could build a frame quickly from saplings and withes.
For longer journeys a canoe was preferable. Most of the canoes in Kentucky were dugouts. Boone used canoes to travel on rivers and creeks to hunt. On April 9, 1797, the Englishman Francis Baily encountered Boone paddling a canoe on the Ohio near the mouth of the Big Sandy, on his way to hunt north of the river. Said Baily, “
I . . . found that he was one of that class of men
who, from nature and habit, was nearly allied in disposition and manners to an Indian.”
Many if not most of those coming down the Ohio to Kentucky in the 1780s and 1790s traveled on flatboats. Constructed in boatyards at Pittsburgh or at sites on the Monongahela, flatboats had evolved from rafts of logs. They were guided by a long oar in the back and one shorter oar on either side.
Because a flatboat was propelled by the current, it was especially vulnerable to Indian raids. Many who traveled by flatboat down the Ohio were killed by Indians or died from diseases caused by the foul conditions on board or from drinking contaminated river water. A flatboat could travel only downstream, and when its destination was reached the wood was sold for building or firewood. Flatboats not only brought people down the river but carried produce, pork, ginseng, maple syrup, bear grease, and whiskey down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
The most important craft on the river was the keelboat. Sleek and rounded, the wooden keelboat was pointed at both ends. Its name came from the large keel that ran from bow to stern to protect the hull. Keelboats were usually about forty feet long, seven to nine feet wide. The deck was enclosed in a cabin that protected passengers, crew, cargo. The keelboat could go both downstream and upstream. On either side of the cabin, along the gunwales, lay a track called a running board. Three to nine men on each side drove their iron-tipped twenty-foot poles into
the riverbed and pushed. Going upstream in a fast current, the men with poles stepped to the front of the runway and, driving the poles into the mud, walked backward, shoving the boat ahead with their feet on the cleated runway.
In drought there was hardly enough water to float a keelboat along the edge of the river. The crew sometimes had to take a towline and pull the boat up the worst stretches. This was called cordelling. A crew was lucky to travel six miles a day upstream by cordelling. Even harder was the “warping” technique, whereby a rope was fixed to a tree or boulder far upstream and the boat was hauled forward by reeling in the rope with a windlass or pulling it hand over hand.
In flood time, when the river was spread out among the trees along the banks, the keelboatmen could push the craft upstream by grabbing limbs and saplings and pulling, threading a way through the half-sunken forest, on water smooth as the floor of a ballroom. This method was called bushwhacking. Where a powerful river emptied into a larger stream, there were sometimes “boils” that shot a boat sideways and could capsize it. One of the most common dangers was wind. A sudden gust could catch a keelboat and send it crashing into the bank or other boats, or onto a sandbar. And on rare occasions when a crevasse—caused by rain or flooding—opened in a levee, a keelboat was sucked into the spill and wrecked.
Hard as it was to pole or row, or sometimes tow a keelboat upstream, it was still easier and cheaper than carrying cargo overland on pack animals. Roads fit for wagons would not reach Kentucky until near the end of the eighteenth century.
Keelboat
. Edwin Tunis. Drawing.
Frontier Living
, 1961. While the flatboat, or broadhorn, was the most common craft for bringing settlers and cargo down the Ohio River to Kentucky, it was the keelboat that came to dominate river traffic in the era before the introduction of the steamboat. (Photo: Benjamin R. Morgan.)
Going East to Go West
1789–1797
The move to Point Pleasant at the mouth of the Kanawha River in 1789 was a step forward for Boone and also a step back. It was a step forward in the sense that he was returning to the woods, to a cabin in the more thinly settled Virginia frontier along the Ohio where he could hunt and dig ginseng and trap mink and beaver. The move was a step backward in the long pilgrimage of his life because he was going to a place he already knew, a step back because it was to the northeast and Boone’s progress had been essentially westward, a step backward in the sense that he was retreating from the vexed land and surveying business in Kentucky.
He had turned the land business over to Will Hays and others to untangle and conduct as best they could, and he sold his store and tavern and warehouse in Limestone. He was stepping back from his many official duties at Limestone also, where he had been lieutenant colonel of the militia, coroner, representative to the legislature. In 1788 he had also been made a trustee of the nearby town of Washington, Kentucky. He was returning to the woods to simplify his life. He was tired of the warehouse, the tavern, the jail, and the land office. In the east the representatives of the thirteen new states were thrashing out the document that would become the United States Constitution. Boone was more focused on his own constitution.
But the new life in Point Pleasant turned out not to be as different as Boone must have hoped. At the new location, where the rivers met, Boone opened a little store and continued to trade in furs and hides, bear meat and ginseng. He may have brought goods to trade from the store he had sold in Limestone. It would have been the natural thing to do. He was backing away from business but only a few steps at a time. Everyone knew of Boone and everyone stopped at his store. There was swelling traffic on the Ohio, and many hunters and trappers and “sang” diggers in the Kanawha Valley brought their harvest down that river to trade for supplies, traps, guns, staples, whiskey.
One visitor recalled sleeping in the store
overnight and being awakened by grease from bear bacon dripping on his face.