Daniel Boone: The Pioneer of Kentucky
abundant feast, were all soundly asleep. It was midnight. The flickering
fire burned feebly. The night was dark. They were in the midst of an
apparently boundless forest. The favorable hour for an attempt to
escape had come. But it was full of peril. Failure was certain death,
for the Indians deemed it one of the greatest of all crimes for a
captive who had been treated with kindness to attempt to escape. A group
of fierce savages were sleeping around, each one of whom accustomed to
midnight alarms, was supposed to sleep, to use an expressive phrase,
"with one eye open." Boone, who had feigned sound slumber, cautiously
awoke his companion who was asleep and motioned him to follow. The
rustling of a leaf, the crackling of a twig, would instantly cause every
savage to grasp his bow and arrow and spring from the ground.
Fortunately the Indians had allowed their captives to retain their guns,
which had proved so valuable in obtaining game.
With step as light as the fall of a feather these men with moccasined
feet crept from the encampment. After a few moments of intense
solicitude, they found themselves in the impenetrable gloom of the
forest, and their captors still undisturbed. With vastly superior native
powers to the Indian, and equally accustomed to forest life, Boone was
in all respects their superior. With the instinct of the bee, he made a
straight line towards the encampment they had left, with the locality of
which the Indians were not acquainted. The peril which menaced them
added wings to their flight. It was mid-winter, and though not very
cold in that climate, fortunately for them, the December nights were
long.
Six precious hours would pass before the dawn of the morning would
struggle through the tree-tops. Till then the bewildered Indians could
obtain no clue whatever to the direction of their flight. Carefully
guarding against leaving any traces of their footsteps behind them, and
watching with an eagle eye lest they should encounter any other band of
savages, they pressed forward hour after hour with sinews apparently as
tireless as if they had been wrought of iron. When the fugitives reached
their camp they found it plundered and deserted. Whether the red men had
discovered it and carried off their companions as prisoners, or whether
the white men in a panic had destroyed what they could not remove and
had attempted a retreat to the settlements, was never known. It is
probable that in some way they perished in the wilderness, and that
their fate is to be added to the thousands of tragedies occurring in
this world which no pen has recorded.
The intrepid Boone and his companion Stewart seemed, however, to have no
idea of abandoning their encampment. But apprehensive that the Indians
might have discovered their retreat, they reared a small hut in another
spot, still more secret and secure. It is difficult to imagine what
motive could have led these two men to remain any longer in these
solitudes, five hundred miles from home, exposed to so many privations
and to such fearful peril. Notwithstanding the utmost care in husbanding
their resources, their powder and lead were rapidly disappearing, and
there was no more to be obtained in the wilderness. But here they
remained a month, doing apparently nothing, but living luxuriously,
according to their ideas of good cheer. The explanation is probably to
be found in the fascination of this life of a hunter, which once
enjoyed, seems almost irresistible, even to those accustomed to all the
appliances of a high civilization.
A gentleman from New York, who spent a winter among the wild scenes of
the Rocky Mountains, describes in the following graphic language, the
effect of these scenes upon his own mind:
"When I turned my horse's head from Pikes Peak, I quite regretted the
abandonment of my mountain life, solitary as it was, and more than once
thought of again taking the trail to the Salado Valley, where I enjoyed
such good sport. Apart from the feeling of loneliness, which anyone in
my situation must naturally have experienced, surrounded by the
stupendous works of nature, which in all their solitary grandeur frowned
upon me, there was something inexpressibly exhilarating in the
sensation of positive freedom from all worldly care, and a consequent
expansion of the sinews, as it were, of mind and body, which made me
feel elastic as a ball of india-rubber, and in such a state of perfect
ease, that no more dread of scalping Indians entered my mind, than if I
had been sitting in Broadway, in one of the windows of the Astor House.
"A citizen of the world, I never found any difficulty in investing my
resting place wherever it might be, with the attributes of a home.
Although liable to the accusation of barbarism, I must confess that the
very happiest moments of my life have been spent in the wilderness of
the Far West. I never recall but with pleasure the remembrance of my
solitary camp in the Bayou Salado, with no friend near me more faithful
than my rifle. With a plentiful supply of dry pine logs on the fire, and
its cheerful blaze streaming far up into the sky, illuminating the
valley far and near, I would sit enjoying the genial warmth, and watch
the blue smoke as it curled upward, building castles in its vapory
wreaths. Scarcely did I ever wish to change such hours of freedom for
all the luxuries of civilized life; and, unnatural and extraordinary as
it may appear, yet such are the fascinations of the life of the mountain
hunter, that I believe that not one instance could be adduced of even
the most polished and civilized of men, who had once tasted the sweets
of its attendant liberty, and freedom from every worldly care, not
regretting to exchange them for the monotonous life of the settlements,
and not sighing and sighing again for its pleasures and allurements.
"A hunter's camp in the Rocky Mountains, is quite a picture. It is
invariably made in a picturesque locality, for, like the Indian, the
white hunter has an eye to the beautiful. Nothing can be more social and
cheering than the welcome blaze of the camp-fire on a cold winter's
night, and nothing more amusing or entertaining, if not instructive,
than the rough conversation of the simple-minded mountaineers, whose
nearly daily task is all of exciting adventure, since their whole
existence is spent in scenes of peril and privation. Consequently the
narration is a tale of thrilling accidents, and hair-breadth escapes,
which, though simple matter-of-fact to them, appears a startling romance
to those unacquainted with the lives led by those men, who, with the sky
for a roof, and their rifles to supply them with food and clothing, call
no man lord or master, and are as free as the game they follow."
There are many events which occurred in the lives of Boone and his
companions, which would seem absolutely incredible were they not
sustained by evidence beyond dispute. Boone and Stewart were in a
boundless, pathless, wilderness of forests, mountains, rivers and lakes.
Their camp could not be reached from the settlements, but by a journey
of many weeks, apparently without the smallest clue to its location. And
yet the younger brother of Boone, upon whom had been conferred his
father's singular baptismal name of Squire, set out with a companion to
cross the mountains, in search of Daniel. One day in the latter part of
January, Boone and Stewart were quite alarmed in seeing two men approach
their camp. They supposed of course that they were Indians, and that
they were probably followed by a numerous band. Escape was impossible.
Captivity and death seemed certain. But to their surprise and delight,
the two strangers proved to be white men; one the brother of Daniel
Boone, and the other a North Carolinian who had accompanied him. They
brought with them quite a supply of powder and lead; inestimable
treasures in the remote wilderness. Daniel, in his Autobiography, in the
following simple strain, alludes to this extraordinary occurrence:
"About this time my brother Squire Boone, with another adventurer, who
came to explore the country shortly after us, was wandering through the
forest, determined to find me if possible, and accidentally found our
camp. Notwithstanding the unfortunate circumstances of our company, and
our dangerous situation as surrounded by hostile savages, our meeting so
fortunately in the wilderness made us reciprocally sensible of the
utmost satisfaction. So much does friendship triumph over misfortune,
that sorrows and sufferings vanish at the meeting, not only of real
friends, but of the most distant acquaintances, and substitute happiness
in their room."
Our hardy pioneer, far more familiar with his rifle than his pen,
comments as follows on their condition:
"We were in a helpless, dangerous situation; exposed daily to perils and
death, among savages and wild beasts. Not a white man in the country but
ourselves. Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families, in the
howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the
happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, 'You see how
little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of
content, is rather found in our own breasts, than in the enjoyment of
external things; and I firmly believe it requires but a little
philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists
in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul
finds pleasure in a path strewed with briers and thorns.'"
CHAPTER V.
_Indian Warfare._
Alleghany Ridges.--Voyage in a canoe.--Speech of Logan.--Battle at the
Kanawha.--Narrative of Francis Marion.--Important commission of
Boone.--Council at Circleville.--Treaty of Peace.--Imlay's description
of Kentucky.--Settlement right.--Richard Henderson.--Boone's letter.--Fort
at Boonesborough.
The valley of the Clinch river is but one of the many magnificent
ravines amid the gigantic ranges of the Alleghany mountains. Boone,
speaking of these ridges which he so often had occasion to cross, says:
"These mountains in the wilderness, as we pass from the old settlements
in Virginia to Kentucky, are ranged in a south-west and north-east
direction and are of great length and breadth and not far distant from
each other. Over them nature hath formed passes that are less difficult
than might be expected from a view of such huge piles. The aspect of
these cliffs is so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them
without terror. The spectator is apt to imagine that nature has formerly
suffered some violent convulsion, and that these are the dismembered
remains of the dreadful shock."
One cannot but regret that no memorials are left of a wonderful journey,
full of romantic interest and exciting adventure, which Boone at one
time took to the Falls of the Ohio, to warn some surveyors of their
danger. He reached them in safety, rescued them from certain death, and
conducted them triumphantly back to the settlements. So long as the
white men, with their rifles, could keep upon the open prairie, they
could defend themselves from almost any number of Indians, who could
only assail them with bows and arrows. But the moment they entered the
forest, or any ravine among the hills, the little band was liable to
hear the war-whoop of a thousand Indian braves in the ambush around, and
to be assailed by a storm of arrows and javelins from unseen hands.
A few days after Boone's arrival at the encampment near the Falls of the
Ohio, and as the surveyors were breaking camp in preparation for their
precipitate retreat, several of their number who had gone to a spring at
a short distance from the camp, were suddenly attacked on the twentieth
of July by a large party of Indians. One was instantly killed. The rest