BOONE WENT ON LONG HUNTS FOR MORE THAN SIXTY YEARS—FROM 1750, when at the age of fifteen he went on his first long hunt, until 1817, the year he turned eighty-three. He kept on hunting even as he grew older and rheumatic and his vision had deteriorated, although the hunts became shorter then, and Boone spent more time trapping and less time hunting. He tried other ways of making a living—surveying, trading, ginseng gathering, tavern keeping, among others—but he kept coming back to hunting. He was good at it, and he must have loved it—being out in the woods or the canebrake, looking for sign (animal or Indian), waiting, knowing when to shoot, shooting, preparing the skins, always taking care to reduce the risk that Indians would rob him of his pelts and his guns.
Boone was far from the only long hunter of his time. As long as game was abundant, a good but dangerous living could be made by hunting outside of the settlements and selling the peltry. But the more the hunting, the scarcer the game became, and the farther the hunters had to range away from the settlement. Starting in the 1760s, numbers of hunters from the British colonies went into Kentucky to hunt in the fall and winter months—among them Anthony and Isaac Bledsoe, Benjamin Cutbirth, Simon Kent, Caspar Mansker, James Smith, Uriah Stone, and Michael Stoner.1 Some of the long hunters were part of large groups sent out by substantial eastern trading firms.2 Like Boone, many of them were robbed of their pelts by Shawnees or Cherokees, who did not like whites coming into their hunting grounds and who doubtless saw stealing the results of a season’s work as an easy way to gain a lot of peltry.3
Many of the long hunters liked to hunt in groups, working from a common hunting station. Boone preferred to hunt by himself or with one or twoothers. Hunting in a group gave some protection from Indians, but as Boone discovered in his first long hunt into the bluegrass country of Kentucky, it also tended to leave far more sign for Indians who were looking for white hunters to rob.
The hunters’ guns were single-shot muzzle-loading flintlocks. Deer hunting called for range and accuracy. Boone carried a long rifle, of the sort known as Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifles. These rifles, which evolved from German hunting guns, were big and heavy; the octagonal barrel by itself was over forty inches long.4 The length of the barrel and the rifling made for greater accuracy than that of smoothbore muskets, but the rifles were not easy to carry. The rifle carried by Boone’s friend Col. John Floyd when he was killed by Indians in Kentucky in 1783 was five feet long and weighed nine pounds.5 Because Daniel Boone was five foot eight, his rifle would have stood nearly as tall as he did. Boone also would have carried a powder horn (a hollowed cow horn or buffalo horn) to hold his gunpowder, a shot bag to hold hand-cast lead balls (at the time typically from .50 to .60 caliber), and a pouch. Tucked in the belt around his hunting shirt would have been a tomahawk and a sheathed hunting knife.6 Boone rode a horse on most of his hunts and on long hunts brought packhorses along to carry gear and pelts.
The need to reload between shots put a premium on accuracy. If you missed the first time, it would take you something like a half-minute to reload, even if you were an experienced shooter, because of the number of steps involved in reloading. The shooter pulled out the plug from the spout of his powder horn and poured loose gunpowder into a hollowed-out antler tine that measured the charge. The charge was poured down the muzzle. A lead ball, nestled in a tallow-greased patch, was put in the muzzle and rammed home. The shooter pushed the ramrod back in place under the forestock, cradled the rifle, opened the frizzen—the L-shaped piece of steel over the pan—and sprinkled some gunpowder from the powder horn into the pan for priming. The shooter next snapped the frizzen shut and replaced the plug in the narrow end of the powder horn, and only then was he ready to shoot.7 By this time, if you had missed on the first try, the deer you were shooting at would have long since run away. There was also the chance, when you pulled the trigger, that the flint wouldn’t strike a spark against the frizzen or that the spark wouldn’t fall into the pan or the powder in the pan wouldn’t ignite or the flame from the pan wouldn’t find its way through the touchhole to ignite the powder in the barrel—and you would have only a flash in the pan.
To hunt successfully and to survive in Indian country, you had to know where and when to find the game, how to prepare it, how to get it to market, how to tell whether Indians were nearby, and how to avoid them. Boone hunted many kinds of game, among them deer, bear, buffalo, beaver, otters, panther, and turkey. For Boone, and for white and Indian hunters overall, deer were the most important. There was nothing paltry about peltry commerce in Boone’s day. In 1767, for example, the commissary at Fort Pitt, at the site of what is now Pittsburgh, recorded receipt of 282,629 deerskins—178,613 “fall Skins” and 104,016 “Summer Skins.” That volume was comparable to the volume of deerskins passing through Charleston and New Orleans. White and Indian hunters at that time must have been killing far more than a million deer a year in the watershed of the Mississippi River.8 Deerskins were important not only for sale in the colonies but also for export. In 1770 the British continental colonies in North America shipped out deerskins weighing 799,807 pounds and worth £57,750 sterling. That aggregate value was not large relative to America’s dominant exports at the time, such as tobacco (£906,638), bread and flour (£505,553), dried fish (£375,394), and rice (£340,693), but deerskins accounted for close to 2 percent of all American exports.9
Animals need salt, so a good place to hunt was at salt licks, where the soil was impregnated with salt seeping up from underground deposits left over from dried-up prehistoric inland seas. Animals would lick the ground for its salt content, sometimes wearing it down more than six feet deep for several acres around.10 Boone learned where the licks were and hunted there, but he also hunted deer in the woods and meadows.11 He knew what time of year was best for hunting deer for their skins—in summer and fall, not in winter. In the depth of winter deer hair was longer for warmth, and the roots of the hair nearly penetrated the pelt and so reduced its value.12 The fall and early winter were also the time of the rut, when bucks were busy following doe musk trails and so were less alert to danger from hunters.13 Boone also knew the best time of day to find deer. While he often hunted all day, he generally would start early in the morning, when the dew-moistened leaves caused no noise when a hunter walked on them and the deer were more visible, being up on their feet feeding.14
To dress a deer skin, Boone would scrape off the hair and the grain. When the hide was dry, he would rub it across a staking board until it becamesomewhat soft. The skin then was said to be half-dressed and was fit for compact packing.15 Half-dressed skins would be pressed and covered over with buffalo or bear hides.16 According to Boone’s son Nathan, a heavily packed horse could carry about a hundred half-dressed deerskins, each weighing 2 pounds.17 The most a horse should carry was between 200 and 250 pounds of pelts. Hunters such as Boone were most vulnerable to being robbed by Indians when the dressed skins were bundled together to be brought to market because by that time much of the hard work of hunting had been done, and the product of that work was transportable and marketable. Indians, like white hunters, sold large quantities of skins to white traders. For Indians to relieve long hunters of a season’s pelts was to gain in a single stroke valuable commodities that could be traded for guns, knives, tomahawks, ammunition, beads, blankets, liquor, and other trade goods.
Clothing being hard to come by on the frontier, Boone and other hunters often made their own clothes out of deerskin. They first tanned the deer hides—heating them in kettles with water laced with salt, alum, and ashes. As the hides dried, they were pulled and stretched to make them pliable and then were made into trousers, jackets, or moccasins.18
The long hunters found that bearskins were too heavy to carry to Carolina, but bears made good eating.19 Bear grease helped to keep off bugs, and bears’ dark fatty meat could be rendered into a superior cooking oil that lacked hog lard’s strong biting taste and that was less likely than hog lard to turn rancid.20 The bear fat could be preserved pure and sweet if slippery elm bark was added to the fat during its rendering.21 Away from the settlements bear were so common that some hunters were able to put up over two thousand pounds of bear bacon in a season.
Buffalo, which we think of as animals of the western Plains, had spread into the eastern states before the whites came to America. By the time Boone began hunting in the 1750s, the buffalo were gone from the coastal colonies. He did not see and kill a buffalo until he entered Kentucky in 1767, but there he saw astounding numbers of them. He told his first biographer, John Filson: “The buffaloes were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browzing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on those extensive plains, fearless, because ignorant, of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing.”22 The cane that Boone mentioned is a woody reed, Arudinaria,Kentucky’s only bamboo. When Boone first came to Kentucky, cane was so prevalent along the banks of many rivers and creeks as to make them almost impassable. Within fifty years it became “scarce and a curiosity.”23
Like bearskins, buffalo hides were heavy and bulky and so not of much commercial value to Boone. The transportation system—the steamboats, roads, and eventually railroads—that enabled trade in buffalo robes and hides to become a big business did not exist until the nineteenth century.24 But buffalo were wonderfully useful in other ways. The meat was tasty, especially the meat from the hump. One young English traveler to Kentucky in 1775 claimed that buffalo hump “makes the finest steaks in the world.”25 Roast buffalo tongue was also viewed as a delicacy by white hunters and Indians alike.26 Buffalo bone marrow, dug out of shanks heated on the coals of a fire and split open with a stone or the poll end of a hatchet, was another treat. Buffalo meat could be cooked slowly on a stick grid several feet above a smoky low fire to make buffalo jerk, which would last a long time without going bad. Boone must have carried buffalo jerk and parched corn or johnnycake (bread made from baking cornmeal mush) as lightweight foods on his travels.27
A killed buffalo could provide much more than meat. The wool could be shorn, washed, carded, and spun. The hide could make a robe or a blanket, or it could be tanned and made into tough, long-lasting shoe leather or else cut and twisted into tugs. Buffalo horns made fine powder horns or spoons or buttons, once the smelly cores were boiled out of the horns.28 All in all, as a traveler in 1780 noted, “this Animal is of the greatest service” to the Americans in Kentucky: “They made fiddle strings of the Sinues of the spine of the buffalo and sewed their mockasins with them being very strong and when dried very easily divided into Small fibers… of the horns they make Combs etc. the flesh is their common food, the Skins tanned makes a good leather but a little spongier than some Cattle, the hair on the skin in May, June and July is short smooth and fine, in the winter the coat thickens turns wooly and Feby is at the best these they spin into yarn and work it into coarse clothes like wool.”29
There really was not any downside to buffalo, but their size and toughness presented challenges. As Daniel Bryan put it, “Two men couldn’t turn a big bull buffalo, if he had fallen on his side.”30 The temptation was just to take the hump and the tongue and leave the rest of the dead beast for scavengers, but the carcass could be gutted, split, and draped over a horse to becarried to camp for butchering. Buffalo were also hard to kill, if you didn’t know where to shoot them. Shooting at their massive foreheads had little effect. One hunter in the Kentucky bluegrass in 1779 fired at a buffalo from ten steps away and hit it just above the eyes and between the horns. The ball bounced off, flat as a halfpenny. The hunter retrieved the flattened ball, chewed the lead into a round shape, loaded it back into his rifle, fired again, hit the buffalo frontally, and had to run away when the buffalo charged him.31 In 1775 some travelers on the Ohio River seized a swimming buffalo by the tail and were towed by it for a half-hour. They “shot him eight times, let him get ashore and he ran away.”32 In the famously hard winter of 1779–80, Daniel Trabue, a Harrodsburg settler, shot and felled a buffalo bull not far from the settlement. Realizing he had shot the buffalo too high, Trabue told the men who were with him to shoot it again. A young Irishman said he would kill the animal with his tomahawk and began striking it on the forehead. Trabue described what happened next:
I told him it would not Do, he could not hurt him, the wool and mud and skin and skull was all so thick it would not Do. But he kept up his licks, a nocking a way.
The buffelo Jumped up. The man run, the buffelo after him. It was opin woods, no bushes, and the way this young Irishman ran was rather Descending ground and every Jump he cried out, “O lard! O lard! O lard! O lard!”
The buffelo was close to his heels. The man Jum[p]ed behind a beech tree. The bufflo fell Down, his head against the tree, the tuckeyho boys [the eastern Virginians traveling with Trabue] laughing, “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
One of them went up and shot the buffelo again and killed him. The Irishmain exclaimed against them, saying this was no laughing Matter but that these boys… was such fools they would laugh at it if the buffelo had killed him.
The young men kept mimicking him: “O lard! O lard!” The Irishman said “he would go no further with such fools,” and split off from the group in a huff, taking with him a load of meat from the (finally) dead buffalo.33
Beaver and otter were valued for their furs, which became fuller, oilier, and more precious in the winter months, when deerskins were less valuable.Boone trapped both animals, in Kentucky and, in later life, in Missouri. Beaver traps were set in streams within six feet of the shore, in only a few inches of water but at a place where the bank dropped off sharply. The trap was on a chain fastened to a stake in the ground. The preferred bait was beaver musk, or castor, extracted from the scent glands of a dead beaver and rubbed on the upper end of a pole stuck into the ground at the water’s edge, in front of the trap. A swimming beaver that smelled the musk would swim toward it and put its forepaws down, and the trap would spring and close on a forepaw. The beaver would swim toward the deeper water, and the weight of the trap would usually pull the beaver under, drowning it. Sometimes the beaver would go back to shore and rub its caught forepaw against the trap or else gnaw on it until the skin and flesh could be severed and the beaver could escape. In the absence of musk, hunters sometimes would scent the stake with sassafras or spicebush root.34 Otter traps would be set—either unbaited or baited with a fish or mussel on a stick in front of the trap—where an otter slide led into a stream. Otter were rarer than beaver and less likely to wring their feet off in a trap.35 Beaver skins were stretched and dried on hoops, often made of grapevine. Otter skins were dried on a bow or drying board worked into the skin. A dried beaver skin might weigh a pound and a quarter, an otter skin a pound. A horse could pack close to two hundred beaver or otter skins, which were worth more than deerskins. A beaver skin was worth about $2.50, two and a half times the value of a deerskin. Otter skins were worth from $3 to $5 each.36
Boone hunted turkeys as food, not to sell, and he also occasionally killed panthers and wolves.37 Panther skin was not readily marketable but had ceremonial value. When Boone and other Boonesborough leaders parlayed with their Indian besiegers during the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, the Indians spread a panther skin on a log for the negotiators to sit on.38 Nor was there a ready market for wolf skins, though Boone killed several wolves. Once when Boone was hunting alone, a wolf snatched up his hat and ran off with it. Boone shot the wolf and retrieved his hat.39 In 1775, after the Indians attacked Boone and his axemen as they blazed the road to lead settlers into Kentucky, a rabid wolf three times came into Boone’s camp at night seeking to bite one particular member of the group, a man named James Nall. On the third try the wolf bit Nall on the forehead, and the others there killed the wolf. The forehead wound soon healed, but that autumn Nall had a hydrophobic fit and was tied up so he could not bite others. He died during his next fit.40
Once Boone or other hunters killed game and prepared their pelts, the pelts had to be taken to market. That was no easy task, before the Louisiana Purchase, if the hunting had been done west of the Appalachians. Most roads were rough paths or buffalo traces. The Ohio ran the wrong way to take goods easily by water to the east. Rowing or hauling boats upstream was hard and slow work, though some freight was carried upstream, and many pelts were traded at Fort Pitt.41 A hunter could instead take the long trip downstream down the Ohio and, outside of the British colonies, down the Mississippi to St. Louis and New Orleans, in Spanish (later French) Louisiana. But would a hunter from the British colonies be welcome there? Access by trans-Allegheny traders to New Orleans, which became a critical question after the Revolution and before the Louisiana Purchase, was already a central issue for the long hunters in Kentucky. Even if a Kentucky hunter were permitted to trade in New Orleans, getting back to the British settlements was a challenge, as Boone knew from his own family’s experience. Benjamin Cutbirth, who married one of Boone’s nieces, joined other long hunters in Tennessee around 1767, then took his pelts down to New Orleans; on the way back to Carolina, traveling by foot, he was robbed by Choctaws.42 Going back by water, up the Mississippi, against the current, before there were steamboats, was arduous and dangerous.43 For all these reasons, until Boone moved out to Missouri, he typically took his pelts on horseback down through the Cumberland Gap and back to the settlements in North Carolina or Virginia for sale or else sold them to traders going to the settlements aboard pack trains or upstream by boat.
The long hunter’s life in Boone’s Kentucky was inherently transient. There was an inexorable dynamic to market hunting and the fur trade—one that pushed the hunters ever farther westward and that ultimately destroyed hunting as a significant factor in the American economy. The simple fact was that Boone and the other market hunters killed far more game animals each year than were born in the wild, and fewer and fewer of these animals would be born each year as the number of adults shrank and as encroaching settlements destroyed the animals’ habitat. The yield from hunting was not sustainable.
Boone was able to put game on the table when he started hunting in Pennsylvania. When his family moved south and west to North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, there were plenty of deer and bears to shoot, though no buffalo. When Boone went on his first long hunt in 1750, he went farther afieldto find quantities of deer—up to the high piedmont near the Virginia–North Carolina border. Boone was able to kill hundreds of deer when he entered Kentucky starting in 1769—and bears and buffalo too. But he and other long hunters had to move steadily farther and farther into the wilderness to find large amounts of game. One hunter in Kentucky moved his family thirty-four times in thirty-two years so that he could “follow the gaim to keep in the best hunting ground.”44 Boone moved just as often.
Boone saw herds of hundreds of buffalo when he arrived in Kentucky as well as buffalo traces—paths trod by buffalo—as big as a public road. The great buffalo trace between the Lower Blue Licks and Crab Orchard was “worn down often a foot or more by travel of the buffalos,” and the buffalo road at the Blue Licks was reported to be “40 yards wide, and that for a good distance.”45 By the time Boone left for Missouri in 1799, buffalo were already scarce in Kentucky. By 1800 none, or only scattered survivors, were to be found in the state or, for that matter, anywhere in the United States east of the Mississippi.46
In Missouri there was enough game for eating near where Boone lived. One relative said that Boone “could sit in the door of his cabin, and lay in a winter’s supply of meat for his family without hunting.”47 But Boone told a visitor in 1805: “Here are turkies and deer, but whare is the elk and buffalows? Oh, they have left for the west.”48 By the end of the nineteenth century the mighty herds of buffalo of the Plains had been reduced to near-extinction. In a single century, between 1800 and 1900, the North American bison population plummeted from an estimated thirty million to less than a thousand.49
This destruction of game was not brought about solely by profligacy on the part of the white hunters, destroying what would have been sustainable under ecologically sound Indian harvesting of game. Rifle-bearing whites undoubtedly engaged in prodigious waste. Even in Boone’s day, huge buffalo were sometimes killed just for their tongues, or whole herds were killed just for the sport of it. As one Kentucky settler put it: “They did destroy and waste them then—at a mighty rate. If one wasn’t young and fat, it was left, and they went on and killed another.”50 According to another settler: “Many a buffalo was killed by the whites, and only a little of the hump taken out, or a thigh bone for the marrow,… Many a man killed a buffalo, just for the sake of saying so.” In contrast, “Indians never shot them but when they wanted them.”51 But Indians contributed to the unsustainable slaughter of the game, in large part because peltry gave them a commodity with which to buy from thewhites trade goods, on which they were becoming increasingly dependent.
Wars were fought among tribes, and tribes were driven out of their traditional hunting grounds by other tribes, for control of beaver grounds. In that manner the Iroquois Confederacy in the mid-seventeenth century drove Shawnees and other Algonquian tribes out of Kentucky and in the Carolinas fought and pushed back Catawbas, Cherokees, and Creeks, in what were known as the “Beaver Wars.”52 Indians wiped out beaver populations in order to get skins to trade with the whites for guns and other trade goods. As one Indian told a Jesuit priest, “The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; in short, it makes everything.” Of necessity, as beaver in the East were killed off, beaver trapping and trading moved progressively farther westward.53
Indians also killed and skinned deer in quantities that rivaled what white hunters did. The Moravian missionary David Zeisberger, who worked with the Delawares of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, who had become “praying Indians,” estimated that a single Delaware might shoot 150 deer a year, a rate at which “it can easily be appreciated that game must decrease,” and also noted that “Delawares use no other than rifle-barreled guns.”54 Indians had been trading deerskins to the whites for trade goods, particularly in the South and Southeast, since the trade began in earnest in Spanish Florida in the sixteenth century. Trade expanded as more and more Indians acquired guns.55 Market hunting by Indians in the eighteenth century, coupled with hunting by whites, caused deer populations to plunge and Indian groups to poach on each other’s hunting grounds to find deer to skin.56 By 1765 a Creek chief would argue that the British should lower the prices for their trade goods because the Creek hunters had to go much farther than they once did to get deerskins and even then could not supply their wants in trade.57 In 1807 an Ottawa visionary named Le Maigauis, or the Trout, conveyed a message from the Great Spirit to the Indians around Michilimackinac: “You complain that the animals of the Forest are few and scattered. How should it be otherwise? You destroy them yourselves for their Skins only and leave their bodies to rot or give the best pieces to the Whites. I am displeased when I see this, and take them back to the Earth that they may not come to you again. You must kill no more animals than are necessary to feed and cloathe you.” At about the same time, the Shawnee Tenkswatawa, known as The Prophet, was preaching a similar vision, condemning the killing of game for skins.58
Were the Indians less profligate in hunting buffalo than they were in hunting deer? When Boone and others in 1776 were pursuing Indians who had seized Boone’s daughter and two other teenage girls near Boonesborough, they found a buffalo killed by the Indians, with only the hump cut out for eating.59 That may have been an isolated instance, caused by the Indians’ need to act quickly in light of the likelihood that they were being pursued by the whites. Out on the Plains, where whole tribes had become dependent on buffalo, Indians were taught not to kill more of the animals than they could skin and pack, but there was evidence during Boone’s lifetime that Indians “when hunting take but the fattest and cut part of an animal,” leaving the rest to rot, or cut out only the buffalo tongues, although often all of the meat was cut off to dry into jerky.60 But even if the Indians generally used more of a killed buffalo than did the white hunters, once they adopted the horse and the rifle, they were already, in Boone’s time, becoming able to kill large numbers of buffalo.61
Indians thus helped to bring about the crash in the population of commercially valuable wild animals, after they had access to more efficient ways of killing than using bows and arrows and moving on foot, and had commercial reasons to hunt more than they needed for food, clothing, and shelter.62 The spread of farming and fencing and the increase in human population also transformed the environment in ways that helped to cause the population of game animals to plummet. Other contributing factors, in the case of buffalo, were competition with domestic cattle for pasture, domestic cattle diseases such as anthrax and brucellosis, and droughts and blizzards. But the sheer killing ability of market hunters such as Boone, left unchecked, by itself was enough to decimate animal populations to an extent that would drive the hunters farther and farther west in search of game.
The hunting that Boone and the other long hunters did so well, and that Boone clearly relished, could not be sustained. The long hunters’ skill and firepower carried with them the seeds of the destruction of the hunters’ way of life.