DANIEL BOONE WAS BORN IN 1734 INTO A QUAKER FAMILY IN PENNsylvania. Although Boone’s father was expelled from his Quaker meeting when Boone was fourteen, and Daniel as an adult never went regularly to any religious services, Quaker principles surely shaped his values. Daniel’s father, Squire Boone—“Squire” was his first name, not a title—was a weaver by trade, whose family came from near Exeter, in Devonshire, in southwestern England. They were Friends, or Quakers, members of a Protestant group often persecuted in England. Quakers refused to pay tithes to the established Church of England. Consistent with their belief that all men had an inner light—had within their souls an element of the divine goodness—Quakers would not doff their hats to others and addressed all men with the familiar second person singular thee and thou, not the more formal second person you. This practice irritated people who thought themselves socially superior. Nor would Quakers take oaths, including the required oath renouncing Catholicism. For all of these reasons Quakers in England often ended up in prison.1
In 1681 William Penn, a rich Quaker, was granted Pennsylvania as a colony by King Charles II, partly to pay off a debt the king owed to Penn’s father. Penn, who had been imprisoned in England for his beliefs, set up Pennsylvania to be a haven for Quakers and other persecuted Protestant sects, a colony in which people could live together in “love and brotherly kindness.” In that spirit Penn named the colony’s principal city “Philadelphia”—“brotherly love”—and proclaimed that “liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right.”2 Penn also set up the colony in the hopes (shared by many who came to America or who moved west as the American frontier shifted west) of substantial income from selling land to settlers. Between 1681 and 1685 alone, Penn sold over 700,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania.3
Quaker settlers by the beginning of the eighteenth century made up at least half of Pennsylvania’s population. In 1713 Squire Boone became part of the Quaker emigration from England to Penn’s colony. Seven years later he married Sarah Morgan, before a Quaker meeting in Gwynedd, some twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Daniel Boone was born on November 2, 1734, the sixth of eleven children of Squire and Sarah Boone.4 Boone’s family was then living in a log house in Oley Township, about fifty miles northwest of Philadelphia, near what is now Reading. The Oley Valley had rich farmland and a diverse group of settlers—English, French, Germans, Irish, Swedish, Swiss, and Welsh. Squire Boone owned a dairy herd as well as several looms and a smith’s forge. The area where the Boones lived, named Exeter in 1741 after the town in England from which the family had come, was close to the western end of British settlement in Pennsylvania. At the time Britain’s settlements in America on average were not more than a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.5 Indians lived not far to the west of the Boones—Delawares mostly, but also Shawnees, Tuscaroras, and others.
Penn and his agents sought to treat the Indians fairly. They paid for land, rather than killing for it.6 There had been some Indian-white friction and fighting near where the Boones lived. In 1728, a few years before Daniel Boone was born, a Shawnee and two settlers had been killed, and Boone’s grandfather George Boone, a local magistrate, had rescued two Indian girls from some angry settlers.7 Until the French and Indian War started in the 1750s, however, Indian killings of whites (and vice versa) were far less common in Pennsylvania than they were to be in Kentucky in the 1770s and 1780s and less common than they were in Virginia and the Carolinas during the first half of the eighteenth century. The relative absence of violence between Indians and whites in Pennsylvania during this period (known as the Long Peace) resulted in part from the Quaker policy of treating the Indians fairly—coupled with the less aggressive penetration of western lands by Pennsylvanians at that time and the Pennsylvania proprietors’ frugal reluctance to incur the heavy expense of warfare against the Indians.8
Boone would have seen Indians passing near his family’s house. In 1736, for example, the Delaware chief Sassanoon and a party of twenty-five Indians stopped at George Boone’s house on their way to Philadelphia, a visit showing both George Boone’s status as a local official and his reputation among the Delawares.9 The Boones would not have viewed all Indians with fear and hatred. Boone’s family, and the Quaker meeting in Exeter to which the family belonged, would have taught Boone to think of Indians not as devils incarnate but, rather, as children of God. That attitude went back to George Fox, a founder of the Quaker movement. When Fox in the 1670s visited North Carolina, he met a doctor who disputed the Quaker claim that every man bore within him an inner spirit of God. The doctor said that no such spirit was in the Indians. “Whereupon I called an Indian to us,” Fox wrote, “and asked him whether when he lied or did wrong to anyone there was not something in him that reproved him for it. He said there was such a thing in him, that did so reprove him, and he was ashamed when he had done wrong, or spoken wrong.”10
William Penn’s views of Indians accorded with those of Fox. The preamble to Pennsylvania’s 1681 royal charter refers to Penn’s desire not only to enlarge the English empire but also “to reduce the savage natives, by gentle and just manners, to the love of civil society and Christian religion.”11 In his first letter to the leaders of the Delawares, Penn wrote that the one great God had written his law in human hearts, that men should do good and not harm to one another. Penn told the Indians that he desired to “winn and gain their love and friendship by a kind, just and peaceable life,” and if any Pennsylvania settlers were to offend the Indians, the Indians were to have full satisfaction by a jury made up of equal numbers of their people and settlers.12 Penn also learned enough Delaware to be able to talk to the Delawares without an interpreter.13
Despite the Quaker rejection of war, relations between European settlers and Indians in Pennsylvania began to be strained by the 1750s, when Boone was in his teens. France by this time was inciting and backing the Indians as part of its growing effort to gain control of trade in the Ohio Valley, and Penn’s descendants had irritated the Indians by sharp practices such as the “Walking Purchase” of 1737 of land as far as a man could walk in a day and a half, which the Penn agents measured by having an extremely fit man run sixty-five miles in that time period.14 Indeed, the Penn family’s desire for revenues from selling land to settlers had from the birth of Pennsylvania conflicted with Penn’s stated kindly intentions toward the Indians.15
If Exeter in Boone’s youth was not wild and bloody, it was nevertheless close to the frontier. The Boone family had a frontiersman’s informal approach to the constraints of religious orthodoxy—an approach that led to Squire Boone’s expulsion from his Quaker meeting. The Friends of Exeter Meeting first rebuked Squire Boone in 1742 because his daughter Sarah “hath contrary to the good order used amongst Friends joined herself in marriage to one that is not joined to our Society.” Quakers at the time condemned “mongrel marriages” with “unbelievers.”16 Three Quaker men confronted Squire Boone about Sarah’s marriage, and Squire Boone confessed “himself at fault in keeping [Sarah and the young man] in his House after he knew of their keeping company (but he was in a great streight not knowing what to do, seeing he was somewhat Sensible that they had been too Conversant before), & hopeth to be more careful in the future.” Minutes of a later meeting of the Exeter Friends help us to decipher this entry about the couple having already been “too Conversant”: a committee of Quaker women reported that Sarah “was with child before she was married.” Sarah had to read a written confession before the Exeter meeting.
The incident indicates an openness on the part of the Boones toward sexual relations as part of life. That same openness was to be seen also in the adult Daniel Boone, in his wife Rebecca, and in his daughter Susannah. Sex before marriage was common on the American southern and mid-Atlantic frontier. An Anglican priest in the Carolina backcountry in 1767 calculated that 94 percent of the brides at the weddings over which he officiated were pregnant on their wedding day, many them indeed “very big” with child.17 This casual attitude toward premarital sex arose partly from the relative scarcity of women: many more men than women emigrated to America from England and Scotland, and the farther west the settlements were and the more frontier-like the conditions, the greater the ratio of men to women was likely to become.18 To Quakers, however, sex before marriage, being fornication, could lead to being cast out of the Quaker meeting.19
As a boy, Boone had the job of following the family cattle in the woods and bringing them back each evening to the cow pens, where Boone’s mother milked them. Boone became fond of life in the woods. Even as a boy of ten, he liked to hunt, killing birds and small game by throwing a knobbed club at them when he was meant to be tending his father’s cattle. In 1747, when Boone was thirteen, his father gave him a “short rifle-gun,” which enabled him to shoot deer. The boy became a good marksman. Boone’s son Nathan said that his father “often neglected his herding duties to hunt, but this experience gave him his love of woods and hunting.”20
Boone never went to school for any length of time—indeed, his son Nathan believed Boone never attended school.21 According to one family tale, which sounds more like folklore than fact, while in Pennsylvania Boonebriefly went to a school taught by an Irish teacher who used to go off into the woods to take a pull from a jug he had hidden in a tree. Boone found the jug, put an herbal emetic in the liquor, and laughed when the teacher began to suffer in class. When the teacher tried to cane the boy, Boone knocked him down and ran home, never to return to school.22 Another family story had Boone’s bachelor uncle John, who ran a school, trying to teach young Boone, who would not learn despite liberal encouragement with a rod. Squire Boone reportedly said, “It’s all right, John; let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting, and between you and me that is what we most need.”23 Boone was not illiterate, however. The wife of his older brother Samuel taught him to read and write when he was in Pennsylvania. Boone later learned more reading and writing, and some arithmetic, from his daughter Susannah’s husband, Will Hays.24 Boone’s spelling was often phonetic, but that was common on the frontier. It is at least possible to discern the meaning of what Boone wrote, which is more than can be done with the writings of some of his contemporaries, such as the great western military campaigner George Rogers Clark.25
In 1747 Boone’s older brother Israel married a non-Quaker, causing the Friends of Exeter to issue a second reprimand to Squire Boone. It may well be that Squire Boone was perplexed by the idea that marriage was permissible only within one denomination and that he had had enough of being forced to acknowledge guilt and transgression in open meetings for things he did not think were wrong. He also may have felt less pressure to conform with Quaker requests following the death in 1744 of his observant Quaker father. Whatever the reason, when the Quaker brethren came around to remonstrate about Israel’s marriage, Squire Boone was recalcitrant. According to the minutes of the Exeter meeting, “The Friends which were appointed to speak to Squire Boone report that they spoke with him and that he could not see that he had transgressed, and therefore was not willing to condemn it until he saw it to be a transgression.” Instead of being “willing to give any satisfaction to the Meeting,” Squire Boone argued back “even against his Friends who sought his everlasting Peace and Welfare, and against the Order and Discipline of Friends in general.” The upshot was that in May 1748 the Exeter Society of Friends “disowned” Squire Boone; in other words, the group expelled him from their Quaker meeting, giving “publick testimony against him as not being a member amongst us, until such time as we may be sensible of his coming to a Godly sorrow in himself.”26 At the time of theexpulsion, the Boone family was thinking about moving to northwestern North Carolina, having heard that large tracts of land were being sold there for little money. By 1750 Squire Boone had filed a claim for land along the forks of the Yadkin River in northwestern North Carolina, and the family was settled there the next year.
Boone left the Society of Friends when his family left Pennsylvania. After 1750, when Boone was sixteen, there is no record of Boone’s regular attendance at Quaker meeting—or, for that matter, of his becoming a member of any church. This is not to suggest that the Boone family became irreligious. Boone’s mother remained a Quaker in good standing, having requested and received in April 1750 from the Women’s Meeting at Exeter her certificate as a traveling minister.27 Boone’s father, after the move to North Carolina, helped to found a nondenominational meetinghouse and often led services in it. Daniel Boone read the Bible regularly, especially in his later years, and liked listening to sermons “whenever preaching was in the neighborhood.”28 But Boone had little taste for the fine points of religious doctrine. “I never knew any good to come of religious disputes,” he told his friend and hunting companion Peter Houston, a Presbyterian, after the two had had a heated discussion on the relative merits of Quakerism and Presbyterianism. At Boone’s prompting the men agreed never again to have a dispute on the subject of religion.29
For all of Boone’s lack of ongoing participation in Quaker meetings, if we look at what he did and how he did it after leaving Pennsylvania, it is hard not to see a consonance between many of Boone’s principles and those of the Friends—in particular, about the inner light to be found in all humans, the virtues of simplicity and lack of ostentation, and the importance of fair dealing with other people (Indians as well as whites).30
In April 1750 Squire and Sarah Boone sold their Exeter property and started off for western North Carolina, part of a flood of settlers drawn to that region by low land prices. Between 1750 and 1770 the population of North Carolina more than doubled, from around 70,000 to between 175,000 and 185,000.31 It took months for the Boone family to get from Exeter to the forks of the Yadkin River, an area that was still frontier.32 Many Boones, relatives, and friends also made the trek, among them Squire Boone and Sarah’s eight unmarried children, their three married children and spouses, and Squire Boone’s apprentice, Henry Miller (Daniel’s closest friend). In big Conestoga wagons they lumbered westward over the Allegheny Trail to theSusquehanna at what became Harrisburg, then followed along the Appalachians southwest to the Potomac and down the Shenandoah. They may have stayed in western Virginia near Squire Boone’s sister and brother-in-law on the South Fork of the Shenandoah before pushing on into North Carolina.33
The Backcountry: Northwestern North Carolina and the Cumberland Gap
Map by Mary Lee Eggart
In the summer and fall of 1750 Boone, then fifteen years old, went on his first long hunt, with his friend Henry Miller. The two young men went east through the Blue Ridge and south to the high piedmont near the Virginia—North Carolina border. They killed and skinned many deer and brought the hides north to Philadelphia to sell them. Years later Miller remembered that he and Boone, with the proceeds from the sale, had gone “on a general jamboree or frolick” that went on for three weeks “until the money was all spent.” The profligacy disgusted Miller, who decided to settle down, make money, and keep it. He grew up to become a substantial landowner in Augusta County, Virginia, where he set up an ironworks and also owned a paper mill, a sawmill, and a gristmill.34 Judging by Boone’s subsequent career, Boone must have drawn differing conclusions from his first long hunt: he liked hunting; he was good at it; he could make a living at it; and he may have enjoyed the occasional “frolick.”
Land was cheap on the Yadkin. A square mile cost three shillings—this for land with clear streams and fine meadows. In 1753 Squire Boone bought two parcels, each of 640 acres, near what was to become Mocksville, North Carolina. There was enough land to set up each of the Boone children as they married. Squire Boone became a substantial citizen. When his neighborhood was organized as Rowan County in 1753, he became a justice of the peace and a member of the county court. The next year he was licensed to operate a “Publick House.” There was plenty of clearing and farming and herding of the dairy cattle to be done on the Boone lands, but according to a nephew, Daniel Boone “never took any delight in farming or stock Raising.”35 Even in the summer, when his help was needed to build fences and work the fields, Boone would pray for rain so he could take to the woods with his rifle. He would stay out until evening even if the rain stopped in an hour because he was “so fond of gunning.” As a teenager, Boone worked part-time as a teamster, or wagoner, for his father, taking produce and peltry to sell at the nearest market town, Salisbury, North Carolina. When fall came and the harvest was in, Boone would go off for hunts, lasting most of the fall and winter. By his later teens Boone was hunting “for profit and as a business of life.”36
Game was abundant on the upper Yadkin. There were countless wild turkey in the bushes and beaver, otter, and muskrat in the streams and ponds.37 Bear were common, too. According to one local story, Bear Creek, near the Yadkin forks, took its name when Boone killed ninety-nine bear on the creek in a single season. Deer were even more numerous. Boone and another hunter reportedly killed thirty deer in a single day near the head of the Yadkin.38 Deerskin was a major part of the local economy and had been for years. In 1753 over thirty thousand deerskins were exported from North Carolina. As early as 1700, an average of fifty-four thousand deerskins were being exported each year to England from southern Carolina.39 There was so much trade in deerskin that a “buck”—a dressed skin weighing about two and a half pounds, worth about forty cents a pound—became the synonym for a dollar in the American colonies.40
When young Boone had accumulated a wagonload of deerskins, he would take them to the county seat at Salisbury and trade them for supplies and money. He also entered the local shooting contests and generally won, sometimes with trick shots such as holding a long heavy Pennsylvania rifle in one arm and nevertheless firing it with winning accuracy. One dayat a shooting match in Salisbury, Boone outshot a Catawba Indian known to the whites as Saucy Jack—could it have been for his propensity for rum? The Indian, at a local tavern, swore that he would kill Boone. Squire Boone, who was in Salisbury that day, heard of the threat, picked up a tomahawk, and said, “Well, if it had come to this, I’ll kill first.” The elder Boone’s Quaker principles seem to have given way to defending the family. Saucy Jack, having been told what Squire Boone had said, prudently left town.41