NOTES
Introduction
1 . H. W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic. New York: Random House, 2001.
3 . Henry Graff, Columbia University.
4 . Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex. New York: Random House, 2001.
5 . Louis Auchincloss, Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Times Books, 2002.
6 . Senator John McCain, with Mark Salter. Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2002.
From The Winning of the West
1 . To this I can testify of my own knowledge as regards Montana, Dakota, and Minnesota. The mixture usually takes place in the ranks of the population where individuals lose all trace of their ancestry after two or three generations; so it is often honestly ignored, and sometimes mention of it is suppressed, the man regarding it as a taint. But I also know many very wealthy old frontiersmen whose half-breed children are now being educated, generally at convent schools, while in the Northwestern cities I could point out some very charming men and women, in the best society, with a strain of Indian blood in their veins.
2 . This is true as a whole; but along the Mississippi, in the extreme west of the present Kentucky and Tennessee, the Chickasaws held possession. There was a Shawnee town south of the Ohio, and Cherokee villages in southeastern Tennessee.
3 . The backwoodsmen generally used “trace,” where western frontiersmen would now say “trail.”
4 . Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia. He named them after the Duke of Cumberland. Walker was a genuine explorer and surveyor, a man of mark as a pioneer. The journal of his trip across the Cumberland to the headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750 has been preserved, and has just been published by William Cabell Rivers (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.). It is very interesting, and Mr. Rivers has done a real service in publishing it. Walker and five companions were absent six months. He found traces of earlier wanderers—probably hunters. One of his companions was bitten by a bear; three of the dogs were wounded by bears, and one killed by an elk; the horses were frequently bitten by rattlesnakes; once a bull-buffalo threatened the whole party. They killed 13 buffaloes, 8 elks, 53 bears, 20 deer, 150 turkeys, and some other game.
5 . Hunters and Indian traders visited portions of Kentucky and Tennessee years before the country became generally known even on the border. (Not to speak of the French, who had long known something of the country, where they had even made trading posts and built furnaces, as see Haywood, etc.) We know the names of a few. Those who went down the Ohio, merely landing on the Kentucky shore, do not deserve mention; the French had done as much for a century. Whites who had been captured by the Indians, were sometimes taken through Tennessee or Kentucky, as John Sailing in 1730, and Mrs. Mary Inglis in 1756 (see “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” Collins, etc.). In 1654 a certain Colonel Wood was in Kentucky. The next real explorer was nearly a century later, though Doherty in 1690, and Adair in 1730, traded with the Cherokees in what is now Tennessee. Walker struck the headwater of the Kentucky in 1750; he had been to the Cumberland in 1748. He made other exploring trips. Christopher Gist went up the Kentucky in 1751. In 1756 and 1758 Forts Loudon and Chissel were built on the Tennessee head-waters, but were soon afterwards destroyed by the Cherokees. In 1761, ’62, ’63, and for a year or two afterwards, a party of hunters under the lead of one Wallen, hunted on the western waters, going continually farther west. In 1765 Croghan made a sketch of the Ohio River. In 1766 James Smith and others explored Tennessee. Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay, and a party from South Carolina were near the present site of Nashville in 1767; in the same year John Finley and others were in Kentucky; and it was Finley who first told Boon about it and led him thither.
6 . The attempt to find out the names of the men who first saw the different portions of the western country is not very profitable. The first visitors were hunters, simply wandering in search of game, not with any settled purpose of exploration. Who the individual first-comers were, has generally been forgotten. At the most it is only possible to find out the name of some one of several who went to a given locality. The hunters were wandering everywhere. By chance some went to places we now consider important. By chance the names of a few of these have been preserved. But the credit belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to the individual backwoodsman.
7 . August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boon). His grandfather was an English immigrant; his father had married a Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country was still a wilderness. He was born in Berks Co.
8 . The inscription is first mentioned by Ramsey, p. 67. See Appendix C, for a letter from the Hon. John Allison, at present (1888) Secretary of State for Tennessee, which goes to prove that the inscription has been on the tree as long as the district has been settled. Of course it cannot be proved that the inscription is by Boon; but there is much reason for supposing that such is the case, and little for doubting it.
9 . He was by birth a Virginian, of mixed Scotch and Welsh descent. See Collins, II., 336; also Ramsey. For Boon’s early connection with Henderson, in 1764, see Haywood, 35.
10 . Even among his foes; he is almost the only American praised by Lt. Gov. Henry Hamilton of Detroit, for instance (see Royal Gazette, July 15, 1780). John Finley.
11 . “The Adventurers of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter”; nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer’s own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter’s composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett’s admirable “Life” in the Filson Club Publications.
12 . The Nieblung Lied tells of Siegfried’s feats with bear, Buffalo, elk, wolf, and deer:
“Danach schlug er wieder einen Büffel und einen Elk
Vier starkes Auer nieder and einen grimmen Schelk,
So schnell trug ihn die Mähre, dasz ihm nichts entsprang;
Hinden and Hirsche wurden viele sein Fang.
. . . . . . . ein Waldthier fürchterlich.
Einen wilden Bären.”
Siegfried’s elk was our moose; and like the American frontiersmen of to-day, the old German singer calls the Wisent or Bison a buffalo—European sportsmen now committing an equally bad blunder by giving it the name of the extinct aurochs. Be it observed also that the hard fighting, hard drinking, boastful hero of Nieblung fame used a “spür hund,” just as his representative of Kentucky or Tennessee used a track hound a thousand years later.
14 . His remaining absolutely alone in the wilderness for such a length of time is often spoken of with wonder; but here again Boon stands merely as the backwoods type, not as an exception. To this day many hunters in the Rockies do the same. In 1880, two men whom I knew wintered to the west of the Bighorns, 150 miles from any human beings. They had salt and flour, however; but they were nine months without seeing a white face. They killed elk, buffalo, and a moose; and had a narrow escape from a small Indian war party. Last winter (1887–88) an old trapper, a friend of mine in the days when he hunted buffalo, spent five months entirely alone in the mountains north of the Flathead country.
15 . Deposition of Daniel Boon, September 15, 1796. Certified copy from Deposition Book No. 1, page 156, Clarke County Court, Ky. First published by Col. John Mason Brown, in “Battle of the Blue Licks,” p. 40 (Frankfort, 1882). The book which these old hunters read around their camp-fire in the Indian-haunted primæval forest a century and a quarter ago has by great good-luck been preserved, and is in Col. Durrett’s library at Louisville. It is entitled the “Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, London, MDCCLXV,” and is in two small volumes. On the title-page is written “A. Neelly, 1770.”
Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as any other class of people. In the long winter evenings they study to good purpose books as varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow, Parton’s “Life of Jackson,” and the Rollo stories—to mention only volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cowboys and hunters.
16 . MS. diary of Benj. Hawkins, 1796. Preserved in Nash. Historical Soc. In 1796 buffalo were scarce: but some fresh signs of them were still seen at licks.
17 . Haywood, p. 75, etc. It is a waste of time to quarrel over who first discovered a particular tract of this wilderness. A great many hunters traversed different parts at different times, from 1760 on, each practically exploring on his own account. We do not know the names of most of them; those we do know are only worth preserving in county histories and the like: the credit belongs to the race, not the individual.
18 . From twenty to forty. Compare Haywood and Marshall, both of whom are speaking of the same bodies of men; Ramsey makes the mistake of supposing they are speaking of different parties; Haywood dwells on the feats of those who descended the Cumberland; Marshall of those who went to Kentucky.
19 . The so-called mound builders; now generally considered to have been simply the ancestors of the present Indian races.
21 . His real name was Kasper Mansker, as his signature shows, but he was always spoken of as Mansco.
22 . McAfee MSS. (“Autobiography of Robt. McAfee”). Sometimes the term Long Hunters was used as including Boon, Finley, and their companions, sometimes not; in the McAfee MSS. it is explicitly used in the former sense.
23 . See Haywood for Clinch River, Drake’s Pond, Mansco’s Lick, Greasy Rock, etc., etc.
24 . A hunter named Bledsoe; Collins, II., 418.
25 . Carr’s “Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” pp. 52, 54, 56, etc.
28 . This continued to be the case until the buffalo were all destroyed. When my cattle came to the Little Missouri, in 1882, buffalo were plenty; my men killed nearly a hundred that winter, though tending the cattle; yet an inexperienced hunter not far from us, though a hardy plainsman, killed only three in the whole time. See also Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” for an instance of a party of Missouri backwoodsmen who made a characteristic failure in an attempt on a buffalo band.
31 . Collins states that in 1770 and 1772 Washington surveyed small tracts in what is now northeastern Kentucky; but this is more than doubtful.
32 . All of this is taken from the McAfee MSS, in Colonel Durrett’s library.
33 . McAfee MSS. A similar adventure befell my brother Elliott and my cousin John Roosevelt while they were hunting buffalo on the staked plains of Texas in 1877.
34 . They evidently wore breech-clouts and leggings, not trowsers.
37 . October 10, 1773, Filson’s “Boon.” The McAfee MSS. speak of meeting Boon in Powell’s Valley and getting home in September; if so, it must have been the very end of the month.
38 . The account of this journey of Floyd and his companions is taken from a very interesting MS. journal, kept by one of the party—Thomas Hanson. It was furnished me, together with other valuable papers, through the courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Trigg, of Abingdon, Va., and of Dr. George Ben. Johnston, of Richmond, to whom I take this opportunity of returning my warm thanks.
39 . From the house of Col. William Preston, “at one o’clock, in high spirits.” They took the canoe at the mouth of Elk River, on the 16th. Most of the diary is, of course, taken up with notes on the character and fertility of the lands, and memoranda of the surveys made. Especial comment is made on a burning spring by the Kanawha, which is dubbed “one of the wonders of the world.”
40 . They received this news on April 17th, and confirmation thereof on the 19th. The dates should be kept in mind, as they show that the Shawnees had begun hostilities from a fortnight to a month before Cresap’s attack and the murder of Logan’s family, which will be described hereafter.
44 . There were quarrels among the surveyors. The entry for May 13th runs: “Our company divided, eleven men went up to Harrad’s company one hundred miles up the Cantucky or Louisa river (n. b. one Capt. Harrad has been there many months building a kind of Town &c) in order to make improvements. This day a quarrel arose between Mr. Lee and Mr. Hyle; Lee cut a Stick and gave Hyte a Whiping with it, upon which Mr. Floyd demanded the King’s Peace which stopt it sooner than it would have ended if he had not been there.”
45 . They said that in a skirmish the whites had killed thirteen Shawnees, two Mingos, and one Delaware (this may or may not mean the massacres by Cresap and Greathouse; see, post, chapter on Lord Dunmore’s War).
46 . Where the journal says the land “is like a paradise, it is so good and beautiful.”
47 . The journal for July 8th says: “The Land is so good that I cannot give it its due Praise. The undergrowth is Clover, Pea vine, Cane & Nettles; intermingled with Rich Weed. It’s timber is Honey Locust, Black Walnut, Sugar Tree, Hickory, Iron-Wood, Hoop Wood, Mulberry, Ash and Elm and some Oak.” And later it dwells on the high limestone cliffs facing the river on both sides.
49 . I have given the account of Floyd’s journey at some length as illustrating the experience of a typical party of surveyors. The journal has never hitherto been alluded to, and my getting hold of it was almost accidental.
There were three different kinds of explorers: Boon represents the hunters; the McAfees represent the would-be settlers; and Floyd’s party the surveyors who mapped out the land for owners of land grants. In 1774, there were parties of each kind in Kentucky. Floyd’s experience shows that these parties were continually meeting others and splitting up; he started out with eight men, at one time was in a body with thirty-seven, and returned home with four.
The journal is written in a singularly clear and legible hand, evidently by a man of good education.
50 . The latter, from his name presumably of Sclavonic ancestry, came originally from New York, always a centre of mixed nationalities. He founded a most respectable family, some of whom have changed their name to Sandusky; but there seems to be no justification for their claim that they gave Sandusky its name, for this is almost certainly a corruption of its old Algonquin title. “American Pioneer” (Cincinnati, 1843), II., p. 325.