BOONE LEFT MAYSVILLE A BADLY BATTERED MAN. HIS FORTUNES DID not improve in the next decade, as he moved his home from place to place, generally downward economically and farther away from towns and commerce (and courts and creditors). But while his fortunes declined, his reputation grew. Boone was becoming a legend in his own lifetime—a legend that helped to draw settlers and to transform Kentucky from the unpopulated wilderness that had so entranced Boone when he first hunted there.
In 1784, the year Boone turned fifty, the first book extolling him appeared in print. John Filson, who had interviewed Boone at length the previous year, included “The adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” as the first appendix to Filson’s brief book grandly entitled “the discovery, settlement And present State of kentucke: and An essay towards the topography, and natural history of that important Country.” The book included a reasonably good map of Kentucky (Filson had been trained as a surveyor and had spoken to Boone and others in Kentucky), a description of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi, and an appendix listing the stages and distances of going from Philadelphia to the Falls of the Ohio by land through the Cumberland Gap and from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and down the Ohio River to the Falls and beyond. The appendix on Boone’s adventures purported to be a first-person recounting by Boone of his hunts, settlement, and Indian fighting there, from Boone’s trip with John Finley in 1769 through the Battle of the Blue Licks and Clark’s expedition into the Shawnee villages in 1782. Right after the title page was a written endorsement, signed by Boone, Levi Todd, and James Harrod, recommending the book as “containing as accurate a description of our country [Kentucky] as we think can possibly be given.”
The American edition of Filson’s book sold out. John Trumbull ofConnecticut took the Boone narrative out of Filson’s book, stripped it of florid Filsonisms, and published it as a pamphlet, which remained in print for many decades. Filson’s book (borrowed without payment of royalties, there being no copyright protection) became a hit in Europe—translated into French by 1785, published in at least three editions in Germany (a source of many immigrants to Kentucky), and reprinted in England and Ireland during the 1790s.1 Boone came to realize the international reach of the book and of his fame. In 1797, for example, when he was canoeing alone on the Ohio River with his dog and his gun, a young English traveler on a flatboat haled him aboard. On hearing Boone’s name, the Englishman, “extremely happy in having an opportunity of conversing with the hero of so many adventures,” produced a copy of Filson’s book (in the pilfered version appended to Gilbert Imlay’s Topographical Description) and began to read it aloud to Boone. Boone “confirmed all that was there related of him.” The Englishman, Francis Baily, twenty-one years old at the time, wrote in his journal that he “could observe the old man’s face brighten up at the mention of any of those transactions in which he had taken so active a part.”2
Why had Boone in 1783 spent hours talking to Filson? The two men could hardly be more different—the tough old frontiersman and the bookish young tenderfoot. Filson was in his early thirties when he arrived in Kentucky around 1782 from Pennsylvania. Filson must have come across as the former schoolteacher he was. Judging from his pencil sketch of himself, he was small, balding, and unprepossessing. But Boone liked to talk to a sympathetic hearer. Francis Baily wrote that when he mentioned to Boone the siege of Boonesborough, Boone “entered upon the subject with all the minuteness imaginable, and as descriptively as if it had recently happened,” and went on to describe his captivity by the Indians and to trace with a moistened finger on a board a map of where the Indians took him on the lakes, “and the old man interspersed his tale with many a pleasing anecdote and interesting observation.”3 Moreover, Filson and Boone shared a common objective: to become rich through a rise in the price of land in Kentucky. Boone still had significant Kentucky land claims when Filson interviewed him. So did Filson, in a smaller way.
Filson proclaimed in the preface to his book that, “incredible as it may appear to some,” his book on Kentucky “is not published from lucrative motives, but solely to inform the world of the happy climate, and plentiful soil of this favoured region.”4 That assertion was, and is, incredible. Like Boone,Filson had invested heavily in warrants to buy land in Kentucky. With the proceeds from his share of his father’s estate, he had entered claims for more than twelve thousand acres in Kentucky,5 and he had ample reason to promote immigration to Kentucky and the demand for its land by extolling Kentucky’s wonders. He did so exuberantly. Kentucky, Filson wrote, was “the best tract of land in North-America, and probably in the world.” The one hundred square miles from the heads of the Licking, Kentucky, and Dick’s rivers and down the Green River to the Ohio make up “the most extraordinary country that the sun enlightens with his celestial beams.” “The soil of Kentucke is of a loose, deep black mould, without sand, in the first rate lands about two or three feet deep, and exceeding luxurious in all its productions.” And so on, in a similar vein, for over a hundred pages. Even if a particular kind of treasure was lacking in Kentucky, Filson made it sound as if it was just a question of time before it would be found there in abundance. He reported, for example, “Iron ore and lead are found in abundance, but we do not hear of any silver or gold mine as yet discovered.” After the first-person narrative of Boone and the other appendices, Filson ended his little book with a peroration “upon the happy circumstances, that the inhabitants of Kentucke will probably enjoy, from the possession of a country so extensive and so fertile”—a region “abounding with all the luxuries of nature, stored with all the principal materials for art and industry, inhabited by virtuous and industrious citizens,” which “must universally attract the attention of mankind” and where “government, so long prostituted to the most criminal purposes, establishes an asylum in the wilderness for the distressed of mankind.” Filson predicted confidently that to Kentucky “innumerable multitudes will emigrate from the hateful regions of despotism and tyranny.”6
Filson clearly did not believe in selling by understatement or in using colors other than purple in his prose. Filson’s Boone appendix, purportedly a record of Boone telling his own story, overflows with locutions that bear no resemblance to anything Boone ever wrote in his own hand. It is hard to imagine Boone describing himself as “an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness” or saying of the Cumberland Gap: “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 had formerly suffered some violent convulsion; and that these are the dismembered remains of the dreadful shock; the ruins, not of Persepolis or Palmyra, but of the world!”7 But if the language is often Filson’s, it is clear that Boone spent time with Filson on thefacts—the early hunts, the blazing of the trail, the killing of James Boone, the history of the fights with the Indians. Boone was never loath to disclaim exaggerated accounts of his deeds, but there is no record that he ever criticized the accuracy of what Filson wrote about them. In addition to confirming to the English traveler what Filson had said about Boone, Boone, after hearing someone else read about him from Filson’s book, declared: “All true! Every word true! Not a lie in it!”8
After 1783 Filson’s path diverged from Boone’s, even as Filson’s book was working to draw settlers to Kentucky and to build Boone’s reputation. Filson bounced around much as Boone did, and with no greater success. He went to Delaware to arrange for the book’s publication, taught school in Wilmington, and came back to Louisville to try fur trading. Like Boone, he borrowed and had trouble repaying what he had borrowed. At the end of 1785 Filson wrote in a note in favor of my ancestor John Brown of Louisville: “I acknowledge myself indebted to John Brown the amount of sixty-one dollars or sixty-one pounds of beaver, which I promise to pay him upon demand next spring.” Filson never paid the note, despite repeated requests. Brown obtained judgment in a suit in Louisville in 1787, but the only property he could attach in execution of the judgment was one old sickle belonging to Filson. In 1787 Filson announced in the Kentucky Gazette a proposal to establish a seminary to teach French and “all the arts and sciences used in academies,” but nothing came of the project. In Louisville he studied “physic” with a view to becoming a doctor. He proposed to become cotenant of a tract in Powell’s Valley that purportedly had a silver mine. He had an unhappy attempt at love near Louisville. In mid-1788 he wrote in a poem, “adieu Amanda,” saying that “one leap in yonder gulf shall end my pain” and that in Elysian fields he would “forget the pains of love.”
In the event Filson did not need to leap into a gulf to end his pain. In 1788 he proposed with others to develop a tract of land in Ohio opposite the mouth of Kentucky’s Licking River, although he never paid his share of the tract’s purchase price. To lure settlers, Filson drew up a plat for the town, to which he gave the fantastically multilingual name Losantiville (as Filson explained it: “L is for Licking River; os, Latin for mouth; anti, Greek for opposite; and ville, French for city”).9 In the fall of 1788, within weeks of crossing the Ohio to explore the tract with his co-venturers, Filson disappeared. Having become nervous about Indian sign, he made the fatal mistake of leaving his co-venturers and setting off alone back toward the white settlements.He was almost certainly killed by the Indians; in any case his remains were never found. But he and his partners had picked a promising site for a city. It exists to this day under the name Cincinnati, given to it in 1790 by Gen. Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory.10
Filson was probably dead by the time Boone left Maysville and moved to Point Pleasant—but Filson’s book and his account of Boone’s role in defending Kentucky and defeating the Indians were very much alive and drawing settlers to Kentucky. Would-be land buyers poured into Kentucky, down the Ohio, and across the Cumberland Gap, in the full grip of a land boom frenzy. Moses Austin, who went through Kentucky on his way to Missouri, described his conversation with the ill-clad emigrant horde he encountered on the Wilderness Road in December 1796: “Ask these Pilgrims what they expect when they git to Kentuckey and their Answer is Land. have you any. No, but I expect I can git it, have you any thing to pay for land, No. did you Ever see the Country. No but Every Body says its good land. Can any thing be more Absurd than the Conduct of man, here is hundreds Travelling hundreds of Miles, they know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentucky, passing land almost as good and easy obtain.d, the Proprietors of which would gladly give on any terms, but it will not do its not Kentuckey its not the Promis.d land its not the goodly inheratence the Land of Milk and Honey.”11
But the land boom did not help Boone. By 1789 he had given away to relatives, sold, or lost to stronger claimants most of his land claims in Kentucky and was in the process of disposing of most of the balance, in large part to meet claims against him. Upon his arrival in Point Pleasant he turned to other ways of seeking to make a living. He started a store in town, buying skins, furs, and bear bacon from hunters and trappers and selling them supplies. From time to time Boone would send his sons Daniel Morgan and Jesse upriver to Maryland to buy new hunting and trapping supplies in exchange for the pelts that Boone had bought from the hunters and trappers. Boone also continued to ship ginseng east. His shipments were sizable. A Maryland merchant wrote in April 1790 to let Boone know that one of the Boone sons had delivered at Hagerstown two barrels of ginseng, 1,790 deerskins, 129 bearskins, and a number of fox and otter skins, to be sold and the net proceeds applied to Boone’s account—and to let Boone know that he had been “rather long” in paying off his obligations for the trade goods he had bought on credit and that the merchant could not “want our moneylonger,” being himself “in great want” of funds to remit to his suppliers in Philadelphia.12 Boone also tried buying horses in the bluegrass country and selling them in the east. Two Boone sons, Daniel Morgan and Jesse, drove the horses for sale in Hagerstown to Boone’s trading partner Thomas Hart, but many horses escaped along the way, and Boone was not able to cover the cost of the horses he had bought.13
Boone’s commercial activities epitomize failure as a merchant: buying high, selling low, and sinking further and further into debt in the process. But Boone was still a man of some property. On the list of tithables for his county in 1792, he showed up as owning two horses, one slave, and five hundred acres of land.14 The list shows Boone’s continuing slave ownership, though down, as Boone’s economic circumstances had plummeted, from the seven he owned in Bourbon County in 1787. Boone still also had a personal following, which translated into military and political office. In October 1789 the court of the newly created Kanawha County, Virginia—Point Pleasant’s county—recommended to the governor of Virginia that Boone be appointed lieutenant colonel, the head of the county’s militia, and by 1791 the commission was issued.15 Being the militia leader was not an empty honor. Shawnees were still raiding the neighborhood—killing and scalping one Van Bibber girl, for example, and capturing three members of her family.16
Boone also was elected to be a delegate to the Virginia Assembly in 1791, where he served on a committee on religion and a committee on propositions and licenses. While in Richmond as a delegate in December 1792, Boone asked the governor of Virginia to award him the contract to take ammunition to the post at Redstone along the Monongahela (now Brownsville, Pa.) and to carry food to the garrison at Fort Randolph on the Kanawha at Point Pleasant. The spelling is vintage Boone: “As sum purson Must Carry out the armantsion to Red Stone if Your Exclency should have thought me a proper purson I would undertake it on Conditions I have the apintment to vitel the Company at Kanhowway so that I Could take Down the flowre as I paste the place. I am your Excelencys most obedent omble servant Dal Boone.”17
Boone was granted the contract, but he was no more successful as a government contractor than he had been as a merchant and as a land speculator. He did deliver ammunition—some four hundred pounds of gunpowder, sixteen hundred pounds of lead, and a kegful of flints—to posts down the Monongahela and the Ohio, but by the time he reached Point Pleasant he did not have enough rations for the garrison, and his outstandingdebts made it impossible for him to buy anything on credit from local merchants. The captain of the Kanawha rangers, Hugh Caperton, also thought that Boone was bringing ammunition. Boone had no such understanding. After a yelling match in which Caperton accused Boone of incompetence, Boone picked up his rifle and left for the woods. When the county sheriff finally found him, all Boone would say was that “Captain Caperton did not do to his liken.”18 The garrison’s colonel, who may have approved the formation of Caperton’s unit without due authorization, accused Boone to the governor of “total non-compliance” with what Boone had undertaken to do, bought the necessary rations for the garrison out of his own pocket, and replaced Boone as the garrison’s supplier.19
By the end of 1792, the year in which Kentucky became a state, Boone was not only entangled in debt but charged with incompetence and disregard of contractual obligations. On top of the continuing lawsuits and creditor claims and commercial losses, the unpleasantness associated with the provisioning contract may have been the last straw for Boone in his attempts to prosper in the mainstream of the growing economy of western Virginia and Kentucky. The following year Boone closed the store in Point Pleasant and moved with Rebecca into the backcountry, to a small squatter’s cabin sixty miles upriver on the Kanawha.20 He had found game near the cabin a year or two earlier. After the 1797 legislative session, Boone had gone by himself up the river and killed two buffalo, an animal that was becoming increasingly hard to find in western Virginia. Boone and young Nathan went back with some friends to bring back the buffalo meat. Nathan saw great numbers of well-fed possums coming down to the water to drink and killed several to render for their oil.21 Based on these experiences, upcountry on the Kanawha must have looked to Boone like a place where he could live off the land hunting and trapping, out of reach of lawsuits.
It was a tough life, and Boone was no longer young. He turned sixty in 1794. By then, for the first time in the nearly forty years he and Rebecca had been married, none of their many children was living with them.22 Boone and Rebecca moved from hunting camp to hunting camp. Boone’s rheumatism made it painful for him to get about, so he spent more time tending beaver traps than ranging in the woods for deer or bear. One rheumatism attack in the 1793–94 winter was so bad that one of the men he hunted with carried Boone out to his trap line in the morning and back again in the evening. But even though Boone could not move readily, a neighbor said thathe still “would kill more deer than any of his neighbors, he so well knew the deers’ haunts and habits.”23
Boone and Rebecca spent several winters in a hunter’s camp on the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River in eastern Kentucky, at a site he and his son Jesse had discovered around 1790. They had half-faced camps, like the ones Boone and his brother Squire had used in their long hunts in Kentucky in the late 1760s. A visitor said they “ate their meals from a common rough trough, very much like a sap trough,… each using as needed a butcher-knife to cut the meat, & using forks made of cane.” Skins and bear meat hung from tree boughs all around the camp. Boone claimed that he had killed “the master bear of the Western country,” two feet across the hip bones, which must have weighed five or six hundred pounds in its prime.24 He told someone else he had taken 155 bears near the camp during one three-week period and on one morning had “killed eleven by late breakfast time.”25 Boone and Rebecca, with two married daughters and their husbands, one fall rendered their kill of bear into several dozen barrels of bear grease, which they floated downriver and sold at a dollar a gallon.26 Bear meat was worth more rendered into oil than it was as meat, and a bear’s carcass would yield from ten to twenty gallons of oil.27
We can only guess how Rebecca viewed this life. She was well into her fifties, and the life was rough—no solid house, no town or store or station. But she stayed with Boone. Perhaps for the first time, she was with him regularly on his hunts, keeping camp, carrying his rifle when his rheumatism was so bad that he could not carry it himself. During his rheumatism attacks Boone could not move, could not trek to Lexington or to Hagerstown, could not dig ginseng. The couple, through spending long stretches of time together, through Daniel’s need for Rebecca’s help and Rebecca’s skill in the camp and on the hunts, may have grown closer together than they ever had been.
Boone also was getting close to his youngest son, Nathan, then in his mid-teens. In 1794 Boone took Nathan hunting near the Ohio, and Nathan killed his first deer. They killed a dozen more, and Boone killed two or three bears, before Boone one midnight heard a chopping noise, which he believed was Indians making a raft to cross the river to get to their camp. Boone and Nathan loaded their canoe with meat and skins and paddled down the river in the foggy night. They heard Indians paddling across the river behind them before they finally were far enough away to be safe.28 Indian attacks near the Ohio were still frequent enough that Nathan in 1795 encouraged hisparents to move back to Kentucky, on Brushy Creek near what is now Carlisle, on land owned by Daniel Morgan Boone. There the Boones built a small cabin and continued to hunt and to trap, with some surveying, mostly in Mason County.29
In 1796 Boone made his last attempt in Kentucky at a large-scale business venture—the reconstruction of the Wilderness Road. The trail Boone and his axemen had blazed in 1775 through the Cumberland Gap and into the center of Kentucky was still a major route for immigrants to Kentucky, though it was ill maintained, too narrow for wagons, and often bordered by rotting horse and cattle corpses. In November 1795 Kentucky’s first governor, Isaac Shelby, signed an act for building a good wagon road between Kentucky and Virginia. Boone had known Shelby for decades—at least since Henderson’s treaty with the Cherokees at Sycamore Shoals in 1775—and had surveyed two tracts of land for him in 1782.30 Boone, aged sixty-two, applied to Governor Shelby for the contract to rebuild the road:
feburey the 11th 1796
Sir
after my Best Respts to your Excelancy and family I wish to inform you that I have sum intention of undertaking this New Rode that is to be Cut through the Wilderness and I think My Self in-titeled to the ofer of the Bisness as I first Marked out that Rode in March 1775 and never Re’d anything for my trubel and Sepose I am No Statesman I am a Woodsman and think My Self as Capable of Marking and Cutting that Rode as any other man. Sir if you think with Me I would thank you to write mee a Line By the post the first oportuneaty and he Will Lodge it at Mr. John Miler son hinkston fork as I wish to know Where and When it is to Laat So that I may atend at the time.
I am Deer Sir your very omble Sarvent.
Daniel Boone31
There is no record of a reply from Governor Shelby, who appointed colonels James Knox and Joseph Crockett to make the improvements on the road. What the governor was looking for, no doubt, were managers who could supervise a large engineering and construction project and itsfinancial aspects, prepare or review budgets and reports, and let subcontracts. These were skills quite different from those that Boone possessed and had displayed in blazing the road in 1775—woodsmanship and raw courage. Knox and Crockett improved the road in an impressively short time while also changing the route substantially in many places. On October 15, 1796, they placed an announcement in the Kentucky Gazette that ran across all four columns of the newspaper’s front page: “the wilderness road from Cumberland Gap to the settlements in Kentucky is now compleated. Waggons loaded with a ton weight, may pass with ease, with four good horses,—Travellers will find no difficulty in procuring such necessaries as they stand in need of on the road; and the abundant crop now growing in Kentucky, will afford the emigrants a certainty of being supplied with every necessary of life on the most convenient terms.”32
Colonels Crockett and Knox exaggerated the comforts of the rebuilt road. When Moses Austin traveled on it in December 1796, he reported that “although the road has been lately opend for wagons and much work don on it much more must be don to make it tolerable.”33 A few years later, in 1803, the Methodist bishop Francis Asbury noted in his journal both how bad the road was and how heavily it was traveled: “What a road we have passed! Certainly the worst on the whole continent even in the best weather; yet bad as it was there were four or five hundred crossing the rude hills whilst we were.” The bishop also noted: “I found amongst my other trials I have taken the itch; and, considering the filthy houses and filthy beds I have met with, in coming from the Kentucky conference, it is perhaps strange that I have not caught it twenty times. I do not see that there is any security against it but by sleeping with a brimstone shirt.”34
But it would have been little consolation to Boone to hear that the Wilderness Road, as rebuilt by others, was far from comfortable. The galling fact was that Boone, who had blazed the road, was not chosen to improve it. By the time the bishop traveled the road, Boone was many hundreds of miles away. In 1799, disgusted with Kentucky, plagued by claims and disputes, largely landless, Daniel Boone had moved out of the United States to what was then a Spanish territory: Missouri.