ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES
Bakeless |
John Bakeless, Daniel Boone (1939; rpt., Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1965) |
Cresswell |
Nicholas Cresswell, The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York: Dial Press, 1924) |
CVSP |
William R. Palmer, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 11 vols. (1875–93; rpt., New York: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1960–69) |
DHDW |
Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1905) |
DM |
Draper Manuscript Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison |
Dorman |
John Frederick Dorman, The Prestons of Smithfield and Greenfield in Virginia (Filson Club, 1982) |
Downes |
Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940) |
Draper |
Lyman C. Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, ed. Ted Franklin Belue (Mechanics-burg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998) |
Drimmer |
Frederick Drimmer, ed., Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750–1870 (New York: Dover Publications, 1961) |
Faragher |
John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992) |
FCHQ |
Filson Club Historical Quarterly |
FDUO |
Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, Frontier Defense on the Upper Ohio, 1777–1778 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1912) |
FHS |
Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky. |
Filson |
John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke: and An Essay towards the Topography, and Natural History of that important Country: To which is added An Appendix Containing, I. The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon, one of the First Settlers, comprehending every important Occurrence in the political History of that Province (Wilmington, Del.: James Adams, 1784; facsimile reprint by Heritage Books, 2004) |
Flint, Boone |
Timothy Flint, The Life and Adventures of Daniel Boone, The First Settler of Kentucky, Interspersed with Incidents in the Early Annals of the Country (New York: U. P. James, 1868). First pub. (1833) as Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky. |
Historical Statistics |
Bureau of the Census, Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States—Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1975) |
Houston |
Peter Houston, A Sketch of the Life and Character of Daniel Boone, ed. Ted Franklin Belue (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997) |
JDS |
John Dabney Shane |
KHS |
Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort |
Lofaro |
Michael A. Lofaro, Daniel Boone: An American Life (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003) |
MFDB |
Neal O. Hammon, ed., My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999) |
Mereness |
Newton D. Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (1916; rpt., New York: Antiquarian Press, 1961) |
Morgan |
Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2007) |
Peck |
John Mason Peck, Life of Daniel Boone, the Pioneer of Kentucky (1847; rpt., New York: University Society, Inc., 1905) |
Ranck |
George W. Ranck, Boonesborough: Its Founding, Pioneer Struggles, Indian Experiences, Transylvania Days, and Revolutionary Annals (Louisville, Ky.: Filson Club, 1901) |
RKHS |
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society |
RUO |
Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., The Revolution on the Upper Ohio, 1775–1777 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1908) |
Trabue |
Chester Raymond Young, ed., Westward into Kentucky: The Narrative of Daniel Trabue (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981) |
PREFACE
1. Historical Statistics, pt. 1, 8; pt. 2, 1168.
2. Ibid., pt. 1, 28.
3. Ibid., pt. 1, 30.
4. Filson.
1. OLD BOONE
1. Bakeless, 360.
2. Chester Harding, My Egotistigraphy (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson Press, 1866), 35–36, qtd. in Lofaro, 174–75.
3. John C. Boone to Draper, Nov. 20, 1890, DM 16C132.
4. MFDB, 138.
5. “A Traveller,” in the New-York Statesman, copied in the Cincinnati National Republican, Aug. 19, 1823, DM 16C67.
6. Ralph Clayton to the St. Louis Christian Advocate, May 30, 1877, DM 7C43[1–3].
7. Peck, 186–89.
8. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C79.
2. QUAKERS IN PENNSYLVANIA, SETTLERS IN BACKCOUNTRY NORTH CAROLINA
1. Between 1661 and 1685 historians estimate that at least fifteen thousand Quakers were jailed in England for their religious beliefs, and over four hundred died because of those beliefs. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 598.
2. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 459–62, 598.
3. Jean R. Soderlund, ed., William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 1680–1684 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 5.
4. The Nov. 2 birth date is under the New Style calendar. Under the Old Style calendar Boone was born on Oct. 22. MFDB, 10.
5. For a map showing the British settlements in America before 1760 and their expansion between 1760 and 1769 and between 1770 and 1776, see Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 9.
6. For an example of a deed from the Delawares to Penn and for a map of his purchases from the Delawares between 1682 and 1684, see Soderlund, William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 156–62.
7. James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 161–62; Faragher, 18–19.
8. Merrell, Into the American Woods, 35–36.
9. Draper, 110–11.
10. Margaret H. Bacon, The Quiet Rebels: The Story of the Quakers in America (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 47.
11. Soderlund, William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 41.
12. Penn to the “King of the Indians,” Oct. 18, 1681, Richard Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, eds., The Papers of William Penn, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981–86), 2:128–29.
13. Bacon, Quiet Rebels, 59. In a 1683 letter Penn wrote, “I have made it my business to understand [the Indians’ language], that I might not want an interpreter on any occasion.” Qtd. in Soderlund, William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 313, 316.
14. Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, eds., Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 77; Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), 96–99.
15. For a skeptical look at how the Penn family claimed title to lands in Pennsylvania, see Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101–5, 127–28.
16. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 485–86.
17. Ibid., 681.
18. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 129–30, shows that between Dec. 1773 and Mar. 1776, of the emigrants from England and Scotland whose sex is known, about three-quarters were males.
19. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 498–99.
20. MFDB, 11; Draper, 111.
21. MFDB, 11.
22. Flint, Boone, 15–19.
23. Faragher, 15–16.
24. MFDB, 11, 45.
25. A leading historian of the Old Northwest who had to translate Clark’s memoir before publishing it wrote that “Clark’s spelling and syntax were as original as was his military genius; even the trained scholar finds difficulty at times in determining his meaning.” Milo M. Quaife, The Capture of Old Vincennes: The Original Narratives of George Rogers Clark and of His Opponent Gov. Henry Hamilton (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), xvii.
26. Excerpts from the minutes of the Exeter meeting appear in John Joseph Stoudt, “Daniel and Squire Boone,” Historical Review of Berks County (July 1936): 111–12. See also Faragher, 23–26.
27. Stoudt, “Daniel and Squire Boone,” 112.
28. MFDB, 139.
29. Houston, 30.
30. The basis of Quaker dealings with other men was that “men will reciprocate if treated fairly and kindly.” William Comfort, The Quakers, A Brief History of Their Influence on Pennsylvania (Gettysburg: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1948), 6.
31. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 16.
32. For a map of the areas of North Carolina settled by 1759, in 1760–69, and in 1770–76, see Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 17.
33. Faragher, 27–30; Lofaro, 7–8.
34. George Boone Moffitt to Draper, June 14, 1853, DM 2C11 (“went on a general jamboree”); Faragher, 28–29.
35. Daniel Boone Bryan to Draper, Feb. 27, 1843, DM 22C5; Faragher, 31.
36. MFDB, 13.
37. Draper, 126.
38. Faragher, 31.
39. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 111.
40. Faragher, 31–32.
41. William P. Boone to Draper, Apr. 27, 1846, DM 19C1; Draper interview with Isaiah Boone, 1846, DM 19C61.
3. BRADDOCK’S DEFEAT
1. For the increasing westward reach of the Pennsylvanian Indian trade, see generally Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 40–44.
2. See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 224.
3. Céloron’s name is sometimes given as Céleron and as de Bienville, rather than de Blainville.
4. Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 128–38; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 15–54.
5. “The Speech of Ackowanothio, an old Indian on the Ohio, on behalf of the Delawares and others living on the Ohio. September 1758,” Provincial Papers, Department of Archives, Harrisburg, 27:69, qtd. in Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 529.
6. Lois Mulkearn, ed., George Mercer Papers relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954), 39.
7. George Croghan to governor of Pennsylvania, May 14, 1754, Pennsylvania Archives (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns; Harrisburg: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1852–1949), ser. 1, 2:144–45.
8. Lofaro, 11.
9. Petition of John Hanbury on behalf of the Ohio Company to the king in council, reprinted in Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Colonial Frontier (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1939), 299.
10. McConnell, Country Between, 92.
11. R. Douglas Hurt, Jr., The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 33–39; White, Middle Ground, 230–32; Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1764–1765 (Pittsburg, University of Pittsburg Press, 2003), 29–30.
12. For the increasing French influence in the Ohio Valley from 1750 to 1754, see generally Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 135–40; Downes, 54–71; Bailey, Ohio Company, 25–31, 183–93; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 29–35; and McConnell, Country Between, 98–105.
13. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency George Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 5.
14. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 32–33.
15. Conrad Weiser on Sept. 3, 1754, reported Tanacharison’s impressions. Downes, 70–71, citing Pennsylvania Colonial Records, 6:151. Weiser’s journal is also printed in Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 366–67. Tanacharison’s name is also sometimes spelled “Tanaghrisson.”
16. White, Middle Ground, 40–41 (25–90%); Miller and Pencak, Pennsylvania, 35 (95%).
17. Peter Wraxall, “Thoughts upon the British Indian Interest in North America,” Jan. 9, 1756, New York Colonial Documents 7:18, qtd. in Downes, 79.
18. Shamokin Daniel to Christian Frederick Post in 1758, in Downes, 88.
19. Historical Statistics, 2, 1168 (estimated population of American colonies was 1.17 million in 1750 and 1.59 million in 1760); Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24, 113 (total French population in North America in 1763 was about 80,000, with the majority settled in the St. Lawrence Valley).
20. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 530.
21. Draper, 47.
22. Bailey, Ohio Company, 24. Patton had initially petitioned the Virginia government in 1743 for “200,000 acres of land on three branches of the Mississippia and the Waters thereof, on which I proposed to settle one family for each 1,000 acres.” The Virginia council awarded Patton 100,000 acres in Apr. 1745. Patton to John Blair, Jan. 1753, DM 1QQ75.
23. Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977), 82; Peter J. Sehlinger, Kentucky’s Last Cavalier: General William Preston, 1816–1887 (Lexington: Kentucky Historical Society, 2004), 2.
24. For Patton’s inept preliminaries at Logstown, see McConnell, Country Between, 94.
25. Letitia Floyd to Benjamin Rush Floyd, Feb. 22, 1843.
26. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 104–6; Robert L. Kincaid, The Wilderness Road (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), 62.
27. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 152–53.
28. Shingas in Nov. 1755 told his captive Charles Stuart about his conversation with Braddock. Beverly W. Bond, Jr., “The Captivity of Charles Stuart, 1755–1775,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 13 (1926–27): 63–65. On Shingas’s decision to join with the Shawnees and to make war against the English, see McConnell, Country Between, 119–20. For the number of Indian scouts with Braddock’s army, see Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 42.
29. Message of Scaroyady conveyed by Conrad Weiser to the governor of Pennsylvania, “Memorandum of Conrad Weiser,” Aug. 23, 1755, Penn MS, Large Folio, II, Historical Society of Philadelphia, qtd. in Conrad Weiser, 390.
30. Ellis, His Excellency, 21.
31. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 7, 42–43.
32. Drimmer, 29.
33. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 43–44; John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2005), 111–13; Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) 94–96.
34. Maj. Robert Orme to Robert Dinwiddie, July 18, 1755, Great Britain Public Records Office, Colonial Office, Class 5 Papers, 5:46.
35. Robert Orme, “Journal of General Braddock’s Expedition,” British Library, 102–7; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 44.
36. MFDB, 13.
37. Draper, 132.
38. The captive was James Smith, then eighteen years old. Drimmer, 30.
39. Ellis, His Excellency, 22.
40. Cresswell, 65 (Sunday, Apr. 16, 1775). The Presbyterian minister David McClure reported similarly in his journal for Aug. 31, 1772: “It was a melancholy spectacle to see the bones of men strewed over the ground, left to this day, without the solemn rite of sepulture.… The bones had been gnawed by wolves, the vestiges of their teeth appearing on them, I examined several, & found the mark of the scalping knife on all.” Diary of David McClure, Doctor of Divinity, 1748–1820 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1899), 48.
41. MFDB, 13.
42. In 1753, as the French and their Indian allies moved aggressively to seize control of the fur trade in the Ohio Valley, one of the attacks on associates of the leading Pennsylvania trader George Croghan was an attack by Miamis on a trading party of John Findley that killed three of Findley’s men. Downes, 65. For a summary of attacks by French soldiers and allied Indians from the Great Lakes post on British traders in the Ohio Valley between 1740 and 1753, see Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 139.
43. Draper interview with Edward Coles, 1848, DM 6S309.
44. Ralph Clayton to the St. Louis Christian Advocate, May 30, 1877, DM 7C43[1–3], 7C44. Clayton, who told the story on his ninety-fifth birthday, claimed to have heard it from Boone in Missouri in 1818.
4. A GOOD WIFE
1. Draper interview with Joseph Scholl, 1868, DM 24S217.
2. Faragher, 42–43.
3. MFDB, 19.
4. Draper, 141.
5. G. Hedrick to Draper, June 26, 1866, DM 28C67.
6. Draper interview with Peter Smith, 1863, DM 18S113.
7. Houston, 36.
8. MFDB, 140; Faragher, 30–31. Descriptions of Boone vary. Josiah Collins, who was with him in Boonesborough in 1778, said Boone “didn’t exceed 5 ft. 10 ins. Very well set, well made man.… Hair, reddish sandy. Complexion, fair. High fore-head—hollow-eyed—middling long nose, and that bowed over a little wide mouth—and a good set of teeth—of remarkable pleasant temper, nothing appeared to ruffle his mind, or make him uneasy, & of a pleasant countenance.” JDS interview with Josiah Collins, c. 1840s, DM 12CC76. Timothy Flint, who interviewed Boone in 1818, said Boone had “a mild clear blue eye.” Elijah Bryan said Boone’s eyes “were deep blue, and very brilliant, and were always on the alert.” According to Houston, whose account has been questioned, Boone had dark eyes and was “dark complected.” Elijah Bryan said that until the last year or two of his life Boone was inclined to corpulency. Note by T. F. Belue, Houston, 70. A nephew described Boone as “about five feet 8 or 9 inches high stout strong made light hair blue eyes yellow eyebrows wide mouth thin lips fair complexion Nose a little on the Roman order.” Daniel Boone Bryan to Draper, Feb. 27, 1843, DM 22C5. A visitor to Boone in Missouri described him as “about five feet 10 inches in height—of fair, light complexion—and one of the finest forms and noblest foreheads [he] ever saw.” Draper interview with Edward Coles, 1848, DM 6S311.
9. MFDB, 36–37.
10. MFDB, 19, DM 6S41.
11. R. G. Prunty to Draper, Jan. 26, 1883, DM 57[3]. Prunty said he got the story from his mother-in-law, the wife of Boone’s son Nathan.
12. Draper, 140–41.
13. See Joseph Doddridge, Notes of the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia (1824), in Samuel Kercheval, A History of the Valley of Virginia (Strasburg, Va.: Shenandoah Publishing Co., 1925), 251.
14. Draper, 143, 146–47.
15. Faragher, 52.
16. Governor Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil to Jean Baptiste de Machault, June 8, 1756, in Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, ed. Edmund B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, 15 vols. (Albany, Parson’s Weed, 1853–87), 10:413; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 46.
17. Miller and Pencak, Pennsylvania, 112; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 64–70.
18. Downes, 80–82; McConnell, Country Between, 121–22.
19. Capt. Jean-Daniel Dumas, July 24, 1756, Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 395.
20. Washington to John Robinson, Nov. 9, 1756, in The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, ed. W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, 10 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983–95), 4:16–17; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 57 and, for the effectiveness of raids in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 60–73.
21. Downes, 88–92. For the negotiation of the treaty of Easton, see Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 520–52.
22. Bakeless, 31, 438 (referring to a deed in book 3 of the Rowan County records dated Oct. 12, 1759, with an added note that Boone bought the tract for fifty pounds); Morgan, 65, 468 n.65 (referring to a deed of gift dated Oct. 18, 1759, from Squire and Sarah Boone to Daniel Boone, citing Rowan County Minutes, Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, 2:277).
23. MFDB, 14.
24. Bailyn, Peopling of British North America, 116.
25. Lofaro, 18–19.
26. Silas W. Parris, writing for Thomas Norman to Draper, Nov. 3, 1884, DM 2C53.
27. Stephen Hempstead to Draper, Feb. 15, 1863, DM 16C76[2]. In Hempstead’s version, the incident happened on Boone’s return from Shawnee captivity (in other words, in 1778). In another version of the story the child was born in 1771, and Daniel’s brother Squire Boone was said to be the father. JDS interview with Josiah Collins, 1840s, DM 12CC97. Neither of these versions makes sense, since Rebecca Boone bore no children in 1778 or 1771.
28. Draper interview with Stephen Cooper, 1889, DM 11C101.
29. Cf. Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 103, 105.
30. JDS interview with Josiah Collins, 1840s, DM 12CC97. The word Shane left blank presumably was cuckold.
31. Daniel Boone Papers, Archibald Henderson Collection, University of North Carolina, qtd. in Faragher, 67. For a slightly different translation, see Morgan, 128–29.
32. Draper, 403.
33. Filson, 73.
34. Draper interview with Edward Byram, Oct. 2, 1863, DM 19S170.
35. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, May 29, 1885, DM 21C45[2].
5. LONG HUNTS
1. Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 13. See generally Ted Franklin Belue, The Hunters of Kentucky: A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750–1792 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003).
2. In 1768, e.g., the Philadelphia firm of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan planned to send out sixty hunters in four boats; at least two boats made the trip. Otis K. Rice, Frontier Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 23.
3. Downes, 13–14. Other hunters in Kentucky whose peltry was taken by Indians included Caspar Mansker and Abraham and Isaac Bledsoe, who started out from New River in June 1769 and were robbed by Cherokees; a party in 1772 from the Yadkin Valley, under Benjamin Cleveland, also robbed by Cherokees; and a large party in 1771 under Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs, robbed by Shawnees (on the discovery of the loss Skaggs carved on a tree: “fifteen hundred skins gone to ruination”).
4. See Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 206–8, for a description of Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifles and their history.
5. The rifle came down in the Floyd and the Preston families to my great-uncle Preston Brown, who noted on a label attached to the rifle that he had inherited it from his great-aunt Susan Hepburn. Susan Preston Hepburn (1819–97) was a granddaughter of Colonel William Preston. Dorman, 60.
6. Draper, 208, 212–13, 224.
7. For the steps to load a Kentucky rifle, see Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 207–8.
8. Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 92; Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 160, 163.
9. Historical Statistics, pt. 2, chap. Z—Colonial and Pre-Federal Statistics, 1184. The British colonies in the analysis of exports included Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Bahamas.
10. Draper interview with Edward Byram, Oct. 2, 1863, DM 19S170.
11. MFDB, 33.
12. Draper, 229.
13. Krech, Ecological Indian, 154.
14. MFDB, 33.
15. MFDB, 33.
16. Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 91.
17. MFDB, 33.
18. Houston, 21.
19. MFDB, 35.
20. Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 151.
21. Col. William Fleming, “Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Mereness, 640.
22. Filson, 51.
23. JDS interview with William Clinkenbeard, c. 1840s, DM 11CC61.
24. See generally Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 93–163.
25. Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 85.
26. Cf. comments of Kentucky hunter Hugh Bell on how to cook buffalo tongue, in Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 161.
27. Ibid., 161.
28. Ibid., 219; Narrative of Spencer Records, DM 23CC37.
29. “Journal of Col. William Fleming,” Mereness, 628–29.
30. Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 219.
31. Ibid., 160.
32. Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 89.
33. Trabue, 72.
34. MFDB, 34; Draper, 233–35, 251.
35. MFDB, 35.
36. MFDB, 33.
37. A folkloric-sounding panther story occurs in a suspect memoir said to have been written by a Boone acquaintance, Peter Houston, when over eighty. Before Boone left for Kentucky, he and Houston, while carrying a deer ham at night, heard the screams of an approaching panther, dropped the deer ham, and went to Houston’s cabin. Houston’s dogs treed the panther. Boone and Houston went to the tree in the dark. Boone had Houston strike flint and steel to light the tinder and shavings in a tinder-box. Boone fired at the glint in the panther’s eyes, bringing down one of the largest panthers Houston had ever seen. (Boone said, “I have killed many such.”) Boone’s shot in the dark had struck the panther between the eyes. Houston, thirty-four. Peter Houston’s grandson in 1887 sent Draper a purported copy of a memoir Peter Houston had written in 1842, when he was over eighty. The original, according to the grandson, had been in a satchel that was stolen. Houston, 5–7.
38. Statement of Maj. William Bailey Smith, Hunt’s Western Review, DM 31C2[85]; Draper, 501.
39. Draper interview with James Boone (son of Nathan), DM 6S294.
40. Draper, 338.
41. Thomas Speed, The Wilderness Road: A Description of the Routes of Travel by Which the Pioneers and Early Settlers First Came to Kentucky (Louisville, Ky.: Filson Club, 1886), 22.
42. Draper, 188–90; Lofaro, 21.
43. See Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi… (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1826), ed. George R. Brooks (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 68 (“No employment can be imagined more laborious, and few more dangerous, than this of propelling a boat against the current of such a river.”)
44. The hunter was the father of the frontier preacher Abraham Snethen. Paul Woehrmann, ed., “The Autobiography of Abraham Snethen, Frontier Preacher,” FCHQ 51 (Oct. 1977): 315, 316.
45. Draper interview with Edward Byram, Oct. 2, 1863, DM 19S170; JDS interview with Joshua McQueen, c. 1840s, DM 11CC121.
46. Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 163; Krech, Ecological Indian, 126 (extinct east of the Mississippi by 1833).
47. William S. Bryan, “Daniel Boone in Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review 3 (1906–9): 92–93.
48. Samuel Willard to Rev. Thomas P. Hinds, Oct. 14, 1844, DM 24C112. Willard said that by canoeing thirty miles west, he had at least caught sight of a buffalo cow and calf and of a herd of elk.
49. Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, preface, 27, 143 (estimate that in 1889 only about three hundred buffalo were left).
50. JDS interview with William Clinkenbeard, c. 1840s, DM 11CC61.
51. JDS interview with Joshua McQueen, c. 1840s, DM 11CC121.
52. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14–20; White, Middle Ground, 1–7.
53. Krech, Ecological Indian, 175–77, 181.
54. Archer Butler Hulbert and William N. Schwarze, eds., David Zeisberger’s History of the Northern American Indians (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1910), 14; White, Middle Ground, 490; McConnell, Country Between, 156 (in 1769 the Munsee town of Goschgoching, with perhaps sixty to eighty hunters, killed twelve hundred deer in the fall hunt); Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 271 (“A middling good Hunter among the Indian of Ohio Killes for his Share in one fall 150.200 dears”).
55. Krech, Ecological Indian, 156–57.
56. Ibid., 161–63; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 68–74.
57. Yakatastanage (the Mortar), proposing trade terms for the Creek-British treaty of Pensacola, May 28, 1765, Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 96, citing Dunbar Rowland, ed., Mississippi Provincial Archives, English Dominion (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1911), 204.
58. White, Middle Ground, 486, 503–4.
59. Draper, 415, 418.
60. Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 82, 85 (quoting François-Antoine Larocque’s description of a Crow hunt in 1804 and Charles McKenzie’s description of Cheyennes cutting out only the tongues of 250 buffalo cows in 1806. See also Krech, Ecological Indian, 133 (in 1805 Mandans killed “whole droves” and took only “the best parts of the meat”).
61. By the 1840s Plains tribes were bringing traders over 100,000 buffalo robes a year to traders. Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 93–94. Indian buffalo killing never approached, however, the levels reached by white hunters in the 1870s, who, armed with guns such as the Sharp “big fifty,” killed some one million bison a year between 1872 and 1874. One buffalo hunter, Josiah Wright Moar, estimated that he alone killed 20,000 buffalo between 1870 and 1879. Isenberg, 137. As Red Cloud reportedly said, “Where the Indian killed one buffalo, the hide and tongue hunters killed fifty.” Krech, Ecological Indian, 143. The hides were tanned and often made into industrial belts for America’s burgeoning factories.
62. See generally Krech, Ecological Indian; and Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison.
6. BOONE’S FIRST HUNTS IN KENTUCKY
1. E.g., Gabriel Arthur, captured by the Shawnees in 1673 and taken north to the mouth of the Scioto before being released in 1674. George Morgan Chinn, Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 1750–1800 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1975), 12–13. See David M. Burns, Gateway: Dr. Thomas Walker and the Opening of Kentucky (Middlesboro, Ky.: Bell County Historical Society, 2000), 16.
2. Draper, 49; for the grant to the company, see Rice, Frontier Kentucky, 10.
3. Draper, 61; Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 32.
4. Faragher, 66.
5. Draper interview with Nathan and Olive Boone, 1851, DM 6S42.
6. Jethro Rumple to Draper, Aug. 30, 1883, DM 8C190[1].
7. Faragher, 66; Lofaro, 21.
8. Faragher, 63; Lofaro, 21; Filson, 57.
9. Montcalm and Wolfe: The French and Indian War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 526. For the impact of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, see generally Calloway, Scratch of a Pen.
10. For the efforts of both Florida provinces to encourage settlement, see Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 150–56.
11. Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 12 (Britain’s national debt grew from £74.6 million at the start of the Seven Years’ War to £122.6 million on Jan. 5, 1763).
12. McConnell, Country Between, 182–206; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 219–35; Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 66–100.
13. See Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 483, noting that one of the first large groups to migrate to West Florida from the eastern colonies were backcountry Virginians for whom the Chesapeake markets were inaccessible and who had moved to the disputed borderland of western Pennsylvania.
14. Just as “Findley” is spelled different ways, so Stewart’s name is sometimes spelled “Stuart.”
15. MFDB, 15.
16. DM 4C75[8]. The entry is undated and occurs after entries from 1775, but Draper argues persuasively that it must be from the Florida trip.
17. Draper, 186–87.
18. MFDB, 15.
19. Journal of Capt. Harry Gordon for Sept. 30, 1767, in Mereness, 486.
20. MFDB, 16.
21. MFDB, 15; Draper, 188.
22. Faragher, 65–66.
23. MFDB, 17, 19; Draper, 195–96; Faragher, 71; DM 6S6–7 (“Ketched in a Snow Storm”; sees his first buffalo).
24. Faragher, 68–69. The early Kentucky historian John Mason Brown, the author’s great-grandfather, concluded it was an Iroquois word meaning meadowland. John Mason Brown, The Political Beginnings of Kentucky (Louisville, 1889), 10.
25. Draper, 522–23; Filson, 8.
26. MFDB, 23; DM 6S7–8.
27. Jones, License for Empire, 89.
28. Gen. Thomas Gage to Lord Hillsborough, Jan. 6, 1770, Downes, 144–45. For how the Fort Stanwix negotiations infuriated the Shawnees, Delawares, and Mingos, see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2006), 42–45.
29. James H. Howard, Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native Indian Tribe and Its Cultural Background (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 32; A. Gwynn Henderson, “Dispelling the Myth: Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Indian Life in Kentucky,” RKHS 90 (1992): 8.
30. Johnson, License for Empire, 101–8; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 168–70.
31. Lofaro, 43.
32. Johnson, License for Empire, 218 n. 33.
33. MFDB, 23; Draper, 207.
34. Faragher, 76.
35. Draper, 209–10; Faragher, 76–79. See Morgan, 98 (bluegrass may have originated in Pennsylvania).
36. Filson, 51.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 52.
39. MFDB, 24; Draper, 213–16; Faragher, 79–80.
40. JDS’s interview with Daniel Boone Bryan (c. 1844), DM 22C14.
41. Draper, 216; MFDB, 24.
42. MFDB, 25–26.
43. Draper, 224 n. 24; Faragher, 82.
44. MFDB, 28.
45. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1999), 97; Daniel Boone’s deposition, Sept. 15, 1796, DM 4C93, qtd. in John Mason Brown’s Oration at the Blue Licks, Aug. 19, 1882, DM 2C80. See JDS interview with Thomas Eaton, c. 1840s, DM 11CC95 (Eaton always understood that Boone had named the place after a town in Gulliver’s Travels, though the town in that book is spelled differently).
46. MFDB, 28–29.
47. MFDB, 29, 144.
48. Draper, 265–65, 276; Faragher, 83–84.
49. Filson, 53.
50. Draper interview with George Smith, DM 32S480, 31C1[60].
51. Filson, 54.
52. Filson, 56.
53. Col. William Fleming, “Journals of Travels in Kentucky, 1779-1780,” Mar. 5, 1780 (describing a large black and white woodpecker with a bony white wedge-shaped beak and a “bright red head with remarkable large tuft of feathers on the Crown,” shot near St. Asaph’s settlement), Mereness, 632; John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography, describing birds depicted in his Birds of America, qtd. in Harvard Magazine, July–Aug. 2005, 88.
54. MFDB, 31.
55. MFDB, 32.
56. Faragher, 86, 375.
57. Chester Harding, My Egotistigraphy, 35–36.
58. Draper, 266–67; Faragher, 86–87; MFDB, 37.
59. Letter from John B. Roark to Draper, Mar. 30, 1885, DM 16C81.
60. Filson, 56–57.
7. BOONE BEGINS TO OPEN THE WILDERNESS
1. Draper, 284; MFDB, 37.
2. Bailey, Ohio Company, 138–43. For overviews of the different companies and speculators seeking large land tracts in the Ohio Valley after the treaty of Fort Stanwix, see Hinder-aker, Elusive Empires, 168–75; and Rice, Frontier Kentucky, 7–54.
3. Faragher, 88–89; for Harrod’s surveying, see Kathryn Harrod Mason, James Harrod of Kentucky (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 36–43.
4. Faragher, 89–90; “gentleman of some distinction,” Lord Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth, Dec. 24, 1774, DM 6C16. For a biographical sketch of Russell, see Draper, 551–53.
5. Filson, 57; Lofaro, 41.
6. The Clinch Valley resident was Thomas W. Carter. His recollection is in M. B. Woods’s letter to Draper, Apr. 9, 1883, DM 4C26.
7. New York Colonial Documents, 8:396, qtd. in Downe, 153.
8. MFDB, 39–41; Draper, 287–88; Faragher, 92–93; James William Hagy, “The First Attempt to Settle Kentucky: Boone in Virginia,” FCHQ 53 (July 1979): 227–33.
9. Draper, 289–90; Faragher, 94; MFDB, 39–41.
10. MFDB, 41–42.
11. Draper, 290; Morgan, 138.
12. Lord Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth, Dec. 24, 1774, DM 6C16; Maj. Arthur Campbell to Col. William Preston, DM 3QQ40 (includes “it would be easier to find 200 Men to screen him from the Law, than ten to bring him to Justice”), printed in DHDW, 39.
13. Lord Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth, Williamsburg, Dec. 24, 1774, DM 15J4–48, printed in DHDW, 378.
14. Faragher, 96; Belue, note in Draper, 326; Lofaro, 45. For other accounts of the Yellow Creek killings, see reminiscences of Judge Henry Jolly, DM 6NN22–24; Bazaleel Wells, DM 2S, bk. 2, 5–6; and George Edgington, DM 2S, book 3, 34, printed in DHDW, 9–17. Some give Greathouse’s first name as Jacob, others as Daniel.
15. Daniel Smith to William Preston, Mar. 22, 1774, DM 3B115, qtd. in Faragher, 98.
16. New York Colonial Documents, 8:462, qtd. in Downe, 154.
17. Draper, 559, 563.
18. Ibid., 559.
19. See letter of Alexander Spottswood Dandridge to Col. William Preston, May 15, 1774, DM 3QQ26 (“According to your instructions Mr Floyd Surveyed for Colo. Washington 2000 Acres of Land and Sent a platt of the Same in a letter to you”); and letter of Col. William Preston to Col. George Washington, Fincastle, May 27, 1774, DM 15S79 (“Agreeable to my promise, I directed Mr. Floyd, an assistant to survey your land on Cole river [Coal River, which flows into the Kanawha a few miles below Charleston], which he did”), printed in DHDW, 22–24.
20. Washington to William Crawford, in The Washington-Crawford Letters, 1767–1781 ed. Consul W. Butterfield (Cincinnati, 1877) 3, qtd. in Downe, 156; and in Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 99.
21. Sehlinger, General William Preston, 4.
22. Hammon, “The Fincastle Surveyors at the Falls of the Ohio,” FCHQ 47 (1973): 19, 23.
23. Ibid., 25.
24. Journal of Thomas Hanson, DM 14J58–84, entry for May 26, 1774, printed in DHDW, 123–24.
25. Neal O. Hammon, “The Fincastle Surveyors in the Bluegrass, 1774,” RKHS (Oct. 1972): 277–94.
26. Hammon, “Fincastle Surveyors in the Bluegrass,” 283–86.
27. Journal of Thomas Hanson, DM 14J58–84, entry for July 1, 1774, printed in DHDW, 129.
28. Abraham Hite to Col. William Preston, Hampshire, June 3, 1774, DM 3QQ35, printed in DHDW, 31–32.
29. See Lord Dunmore’s circular letter to the county lieutenants, DM 3QQ39, Williams-burg, June 10, 1774, printed in DHDW, 33; for “destroy their Towns,” Dunmore to Col. Andrew Lewis, DHDW, 86.
30. Barbara Rasmussen, “Anarchy and Enterprise on the Imperial Frontier: Washington, Dunmore, Logan, and Land in the Eighteenth Century Ohio Valley,” Ohio Valley History 6, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 22 and n. 51.
31. Neal O. Hammon, “Captain Harrod’s Company, 1774: A Reappraisal,” RKHS 72 (1974): 227–28.
32. See letters to and from Col. William Preston in June 1774, in DHDW, 42–61.
33. Circular letter of Col. William Preston, July 20, 1774, DM 3QQ139, printed in DHDW, 91–92.
34. Draper, 306–7, quoting letters of June 26 and July 13, 1774, to William Preston, DM 3QQ46 and 3QQ64. The letters are printed in DHDW, 49–51 and 88–91. The “best Hands” description is from the earlier letter.
35. MFDB, 42–43.
36. Deposition of Daniel Boone in Boofman Heirs v. James Hickman, Circuit Court Records, Fayette County, Fayette County Complete Book A, 604–42, qtd. in Neal Hammon and Richard Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 1775–1786 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2002), xxix. Boone’s deposition, taken on April 24, 1794, is also transcribed in Fayette County Kentucky Records (Evansville, Ind.: Cook Publications, 1985), 1:178.
37. Journal of Thomas Hanson for July 25 and July 28, 1774, in DHDW, 132.
38. Shane interview with Mrs. Samuel Scott, c. 1840s, DM 11CC225–26; Faragher, 103.
39. Letter of Aug. 28, 1774, DM 33S254–56, reprinted in Neal Hammon and James Russell Harris, “‘In a dangerous situation’: Letters of Col. John Floyd, 1774–1783,” RKHS 83 (1983): 209; Draper, 277–78, 305–11; Faragher, 100–102; DHDW, 168.
40. Lofaro, 47.
41. DHDW, 306. In 1772 the Presbyterian missionary David McClure asked Logan how he was doing. “Pointing to his breast, he said, ‘I feel very bad here. Wherever I go the evil monethoes (Devils) are after me. The house, the trees & the air, are full of Devils, they continually haunt me, & they will kill me. All things tell me how wicked I have been.’ He stood pale & trembling, apparently in great distress. His eyes were fixed on the ground, & the sweat ran down his face like one in agony. It was a strange sight. I had several times seen him at Pittsburgh & thought him the most martial figure of an Indian that I had ever seen.” Diary of David McClure, 56–57.
42. Draper, 313–15; DM 3QQ118, printed in DHDW, 246–47. The copy of Logan’s letter is torn on the right side; the bracketed words are reconstructions of the missing words. For the Conestoga Massacre, see McConnell, County Between, 190–91.
43. Col. James Robertson to Col. William Preston, Aug. 11, 1774, DM 3QQ73–73[1].
44. Aug. 13, 1774; Draper, 311.
45. Arthur Campbell to William Preston, Oct. 1, 1774, DM 3QQ109, DHDW, 219–20.
46. Arthur Campbell to William Preston, Royal-Oak, Oct. 12, 1774, DM 3QQ118, DHDW, 244.
47. Arthur Campbell to William Preston, Oct. 13, 1774, DHDW, 218.
48. Daniel Smith to William Preston, Oct. 4, 1774, DM 3QQ114, DHDW, 228.
49. Daniel Smith to William Preston, Oct. 13, 1774, DM 3QQ119, DHDW, 248–49.
50. Draper, 550–51 (“not popular with the mass of society”); Arthur Campbell to William Preston, Oct. 13, 1774, DHDW, 250.
51. Maj. Arthur Campbell to Col. William Preston, Aug. 28, 1774, DM 3QQ85, printed in DHDW, 170–71.
52. DHDW, xv.
53. Dorman, 1–3, 14.
54. Faragher, 105.
55. Draper, 328. Although some have questioned whether the words are close to Logan’s, they resemble what Logan told Capt. James Wood in July 1775: “Logan repeated in Plain English the Manner in which the People of Virginia had killed his Mother Sister and all his Relations during which he wept and Sung Alternately and concluded with telling me the Revenge he had taken.” Journal of Captain James Wood for July 25, 1775, RUO, 50.
56. For some of the correspondence dealing with these difficulties, see DHDW, 167–79.
57. William Fleming to William Bowyer, undated, DM 2ZZ7, printed in DHDW, 256.
58. Lofaro, 49; Bailyn, Peopling of British North America, 536; Draper, 321; DHDW, 253–97, 368–95.
59. E.g., Boone’s certificate of military service in and discharge from Fincastle County Militia for James McCushin [sic], Nov. 25, 1774, Manuscript Collections C N, FHS.
60. Lord Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth, Williamsburg, Dec. 24, 1774, DM 15J4–48, printed in DHDW, 371–72. The British commander-in-chief in 1769, Gen. Sir Thomas Gage, had expressed a similar thought to Sir William Johnson, the Indian superintendent: “Frontier People” were “too Numerous, too Lawless and Licentious ever to be restrained” by any authority. Gage to Johnson, Apr. 3, 1769, James Sullivan et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: State University of New York, 1921–63), 12:709–10.
8. TRANSYLVANIA, THE WILDERNESS ROAD, AND THE BUILDING OF BOONESBOROUGH
1. Manuscript memoir of Richard Henderson by his brother Maj. Pleasant Henderson, qtd. in Draper, 354.
2. Archibald Neilson to Andrew Miller, Jan. 10, 1775, qtd. in Faragher, 108, 378. Richard Henderson’s journals do not suggest that Boone induced him to make the purchase.
3. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 59.
4. Faragher, 73; Draper, 331.
5. The original agreement to act together as the Louisa Company to rent or purchase a large “Tract of Land lying on the west side of the Mountains on the waters of the Missisipi River” was dated Aug. 27, 1774. DM 1CC2.
6. The opinion was issued by Britain’s solicitor general and attorney general. Jones, License for Empire, 116–17. The East Indian context is clearly distinguishable from the American context, in light of the Proclamation of 1763, the trans-Appalachian rights of Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania under their royal charters, and the colonial laws against private treaties with the Indians.
7. The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 9: 1771–1775, ed. William L. Saunders (Raleigh, N.C.: Josephus Daniels, 1890), 1129–30, qtd. in Lofaro, 50.
8. William Preston to George Washington, Jan. 31, 1775, DM 15S100.
9. William Preston to Lord Dunmore, Mar. 10, 1775, DM 4QQ7, RUO, 1–6. Portions of the letter qtd. in Draper, 335.
10. Proclamation of Governor Josiah Martin, Feb. 10, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 147–50.
11. Proclamation of Lord Dunmore, Mar. 21, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 181–82.
12. Ranck, 162; Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 186.
13. Draper, 333, 363 n. q; Ranck, 151.
14. Brent Yanusdi Cox, Heart of the Eagle: Dragging Canoe and the Emergence of the Chick-amauga Confederacy (Milan, Tenn.: Chenanee Publishers, 1999), 164, 172.
15. John Haywood, The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee (Knoxville: Heiskell and Brosn, 1803), 58–59.
16. The tract described in the main deed was from the mouth of the Kentucky River on the Ohio, up the Kentucky to its source, southeast to Powell’s Mountain, west along the ridge of that mountain, northwest to the head spring of the most southerly branch of the Cumberland, down the Cumberland to the Ohio, and back up the Ohio to the mouth of the Kentucky. The text of the deed is in Ranck, 151–56. A separate deed granted a right of way from the Holston River to the Cumberland Gap. Lofaro, 52.
17. Filson, 80; Draper, 333.
18. Known as Boone’s Trace: Hart Litigation, Fayette County Kentucky Records, 1:669 (deposition of Stephen Hancock), 670 (deposition of Squire Boone), 676 (deposition of Jesse Oldham). A typed copy of the record in this litigation was sent to the author by Neal Hammon in Oct. 2007. The depositions are also transcribed in Fayette County Kentucky Records, 1:187–92.
19. Walker’s narrative of the trip, published in Debow’s Review in Feb. 1854, was written about 1824. It is reprinted in Ranck, 161–68. For “by general consent” and “every heart abounded,” see 163.
20. Ranck, 163–64. Excerpts of Walker’s narrative, including these portions, are also reprinted in Draper, 336–40.
21. Draper, 339; Ranck, 168–69.
22. Ranck, 165.
23. For uncertainty as to the identity of the Indian attackers, see Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 99.
24. James Robertson to Col. William Preston, Culberson, Aug. 11, 1774, DM 3QQ73, printed in DHDW, 142.
25. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 37, quoting letter from Oconestoto to the Delegates in Convention, June 24, 1775, in Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence, ed. William J. Van Schreevan (Charlottesville: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission (by) University Press of Virginia, 1973–83), 3:219; Draper, 362 n. n.
26. Ranck, 167.
27. The letter is reprinted in Ranck, 168–69; and in Draper, 339.
28. Calk’s journal and a transcript of the journal are at the Kentucky Historical Society and are available online at KHS Digital Collections, which can be reached from the society’s home page, www.history.ky.gov. The journal has been reprinted, e.g., in Ellen Eslinger, ed., Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2004), 69–74.
29. Journal of William Calk, entries for Apr. 9, 10, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 17, 1775.
30. Ranck, 172. Henderson’s journal is reprinted in Ranck, 169–80. Substantial excerpts—including materials not contained in Ranck’s book—appear in Draper, 346–53. William Calk noted in his journal for Apr. 20: “We Start Early & git Down to Caintuck [the Kentucky River] to Boons foart about 12 oclock wheare we Stop they Come out to meet us & welcome us in with a volley of guns.”
31. Richard Henderson to the proprietors in North Carolina, Boonesborough, June 12, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 184–87.
32. Ranck, 164–65, 167.
33. Richard Henderson to proprietors remaining in North Carolina, Boonesborough, June 12, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 187.
34. Ranck, 35. Although Ranck describes the second fort as having 26 cabins and four blockhouses in the summer of 1775, Hammon believes the second fort at Boonesborough was not started until 1776. It was built by March of 1777. Hammon to author, Feb. 25, 2008.
35. See Journal of Thos. Hanson, DHDW, 121; Rice, Frontier Kentucky, 72.
36. See report of John Williams, Jan. 3, 1776, to the proprietors in North Carolina, reprinted in Ranck, 233 (Williams called a convention to ask for recommendations for the post of surveyor; those present unanimously recommended Floyd); Draper, 390.
37. Ranck, 174–75; Draper, 347.
38. Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 13.
39. Ranck, 175.
40. Ibid., 176.
41. Ibid., 177.
42. Henderson’s journal for Apr. 27, 1775; Ranck, 176.
43. Walker’s Narrative, Ranck, 166.
44. Henderson’s journal for May 17, 1775; Ranck, 177.
45. Ranck, 29. The documents reprinted in the appendices to Ranck’s book spell the name of the attorney-in-fact “Farrow”; Ranck in his book spells the name “Farrar.”
46. The text of the compact is reprinted in Ranck, 208–210 and in Draper, 369–70.
47. Richard Henderson to proprietors remaining in North Carolina, Boonesborough, June 12, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 190.
48. Henderson’s journal for May 29, 1775, recorded the arrival of a letter “with an account of the battle at Boston.” Ranck, 177.
49. Walker’s narrative, Ranck, 167. For Walker’s career during the Revolution, see Draper, 356–57 n. 20.
50. Petition of “The Committee of West Virginia” to the Convention of Virginia, Harrodsburg, June 20, 1776, Ranck, 246.
51. Letter to Patrick Henry, Hillsborough, Apr. 26, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 194–95. The proprietors sent a copy of the letter to Thomas Jefferson.
52. Rev. John Brown to Col. William Preston, May 5, 1775, DM 4QQ15. The letter is printed in RUO, 10–12; and in Draper, 398. Rev. John Brown, an ancestor of the author, had married Margaret Preston, the sister of William Preston, another ancestor. Dorman, 5.
53. Richard Henderson to proprietors remaining in North Carolina, Boonesborough, June 12, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 193.
54. Ibid.
55. Richard Henderson and John Luttrell to the proprietors in North Carolina, July 18, 1775, in Draper, 378–82.
56. Draper, 389.
57. Richard Henderson to proprietors remaining in North Carolina, Boonesborough, June 12, 1775, reprinted in Ranck, 189–90.
58. Richard Henderson and John Luttrell to the proprietors in North Carolina, July 18, 1775, in Draper, 378–82.
59. Faragher, 126–27; Lofaro, 62.
60. Faragher, 127; Lofaro, 62.
61. For James Hogg’s remarkable career, see Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 499–544.
62. The minutes of the Transylvania Proprietors, Sept. 25, 1775, are reprinted in Ranck, 212–19; the memorial to the Continental Congress is reprinted at 214–16. Portions of the minutes are also reprinted in Draper, 387–88.
63. Boone, however, in 1776 had acquired a tract of one thousand acres, which was held to be properly located. Estill v. Hart’s Heirs, Harding’s Reports, 567 (Spring Term 1808).
64. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 542.
65. James Hogg to Richard Henderson, Jan. 1776, reprinted in Ranck, 224–29.
66. The petition is reprinted in Ranck, 241–44.
67. The petition, headed Harrodsburg, June 20, 1776, is reprinted in Ranck, 244–47.
68. Draper, 410.
69. John Williams to the proprietors in North Carolina, Boonesborough, Jan. 3, 1776, reprinted in Ranck, 232–39.
70. Proclamation of Transylvania Company against settlement of disputed lands, June 26, 1776, reprinted in Ranck, 248–49.
71. John Floyd to William Preston, May 1776, DM 33S294–95.
72. Ibid.
73. Ranck, 54; Rice, Frontier Kentucky, 84.
74. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 34. For the protracted parliamentary jockeying that delayed passage of the bill creating Kentucky County, see John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (1988; rpt., Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2007), 143–44.
75. On Nov. 4, 1778, the Virginia House of Delegates declared that the purchase heretofore made by Richard Henderson and company of that tract of land called Transylvania, within the commonwealth, “is void; but as the said Richard Henderson and Company have been at very great expense in making the said purchase, and in settling the lands, by which this commonwealth is likely to receive great advantage, by increasing its inhabitants, and establishing a barrier against the Indians, it is just and reasonable to allow the said Richard Henderson and Company a compensation for their trouble and expense.” The Virginia Assembly later in 1778 granted a sizable tract to Richard Henderson and Co. and its heirs as tenants in common. Ranck, 253–55; Selby, Revolution in Kentucky, 158–59.
76. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 544.
77. John Williams to the proprietors in North Carolina, Boonesborough, Jan. 3, 1776, Ranck, 237–38.
78. Filson, 60.
79. Draper, 392–93.
9. DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
1. Faragher, 144. In 1782 the commander of Fayette County militia revised upward to 860 the number of settlers in the central bluegrass region killed since 1775. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 48, citing Andrew Steel (Fayette County) to the Governor of Virginia, Sept. 12, 1782, CVSP, 3:303–4.
2. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 36.
3. Craig Thompson Friend, Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 94–96.
4. For an overview of some of the differences among the settlers in Kentucky and the Ohio Valley during the Revolutionary War, see Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), chap. 3, 81–115 (“Distinctions and Partitions amongst us”).
5. Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 93–94 (conflicting claims of colonies), 190 (map of conflicting claims of colonies), and 81–83 (Quebec Act).
6. Richard White describes the claimants who pushed west across the mountains after 1763 as a new “village world” made up of white frontiersmen—a world beyond the control of the governments of the eastern colonies and that had been beyond the control of the British posts west of the Alleghenies. White, Middle Ground, 315–21.
7. Preston was advised that a resolution had been adopted that until receipt of a report from a committee appointed by the convention to consider whether the king acted properly in increasing the terms for the sale of land, all surveyors “be & they hereby are Directed to make no Surveys under [Lord Dunmore’s] Instructions, nor pay any regard to the Said proclamation.” Thomas Lewis to Col. William Preston, Richmond, Aug. 19, 1775, DM 4QQ29, printed in RUO, 21.
8. John Floyd to William Preston, Apr. 21, 1775; Draper, 385.
9. Filson, 66–67.
10. McConnell, Country Between, 190–206.
11. Speech of Cornstalk, Nov. 7, 1776, Morgan letterbook, 1776, qtd. in Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 166.
12. Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 169–70 (beginning around 1779 or 1780, some twelve hundred Shawnees—mostly from the Kispoki, Piqua, and Thawekila divisions—moved down the Ohio Valley, with most of them eventually moving to Missouri to take up lands near Cape Girardeau, under auspices of the Spanish government; according to Shawnee tradition, Shawnees crossed the Mississippi as early as 1763).
13. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 47.
14. White, Middle Ground, 351–53.
15. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, ix.
16. Lord Germain to Sir Guy Carleton, White Hall, Mar. 26, 1777, sent to Lieutenant Governor Hamilton from Quebec, May 21, 1777, printed in Consul Willshire Butterfield, History of the Girtys (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co. 1890), 342–44; Downes, 195.
17. Hamilton to Gen. Sir Frederick Haldimand, dated July 6, 1781, in Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 173.
18. Ranck, 75 n. 1.
19. John Williams to the proprietors in North Carolina, Boonesborough, Jan. 3, 1776, Ranck, 237–38. In 1764 the governor of Pennsylvania had proclaimed the Delawares and Shawnees to be “enemies, rebels, and traitors” and offer a bounty of $150 Spanish dollars for an adult male prisoner and $134 for his scalp. Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 160–61. Virginia also offered a bounty for Indian scalps, though the bounty was repealed in late 1758. Virginia’s governor, Francis Fauquier, had pointed out that the bounty “was found to produce bad Consequences, by setting our people to kill Indians whether Friends of Enemies,” it being “impossible to distinguish the Nations of Indians.” McConnell, Country Between, 124. Similarly, in 1756 Conrad Weiser had opposed Pennsylvania’s adoption of a scalp bounty, seeing it as a menace to friendly Indians, whose scalps were the most easily procurable. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 434.
20. Daniel Sullivan to Colonel John Cannon, Fort Pitt, Mar. 20, 1778, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise P. Kellogg, in FDUO (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1912), 231–32.
21. Report from Hamilton to General Haldimand, Sept. 16, 1778, qtd. in Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 174 n. 3.
22. Bernard W. Sheehan, “‘The Famous Hair Buyer General’: Henry Hamilton, George Rogers Clark, and the American Indian,” Indiana Magazine of History 79 (1983): 4–7.
23. Qtd. ibid., 14.
24. Jefferson wrote Hamilton’s superior officer: “The known rule of warfare with the Indian Savages is an indiscriminate butchery of men women and children.… [Hamilton] associates small parties of whites under his immediate command with large parties of the Savages, & sends them to act, not against our Forts or armies in the field, but farming settlements on our frontiers.” Jefferson to William Phillips, July 22, 1779, CVSP, 1:322; Grenier, First Way of War, 17.
25. See Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 188–89, 207, 210–11, 225.
26. Draper interview with Moses Boone, 1846, DM 19C8; Draper, 447–48, 457 n. g; Faragher, 150.
27. See chaps. 13 and 14.
28. See generally Grenier, First Way of War.
29. JDS interview with William Clinkenbeard, c. 1840s, DM 11CC55. For the Bryans’ reputation for being Tories, see Perkins, Border Life, 103 and 103 n. 45.
30. The petition, headed Harrodsburg, June 20, 1776, is reprinted in Ranck, 244–47.
31. Patricia Watlington, “Discontent in Frontier Kentucky,” RKHS 65 (1967): 85–93.
32. George Washington to Francis Fauquier, Dec. 2 1758, in The Official Papers of Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, 1758–1768, ed. George Reese, 3 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980–83), 1:117–18; McConnell, Country Between, 150.
33. Lord Dunmore to Lord Dartmouth, Williamsburg, Dec. 24, 1774, DM 15J4–48, printed in DHDW, 391.
34. Watlington, “Discontent in Frontier Kentucky,” 81.
35. Letter from “a gentleman of veracity,” July 24, 1780, DM 46J59.
36. DM 33S296–97, reprinted in Lofaro, 75.
37. See White, Middle Ground, 433–68, for an overview of the banding together of the Indians, the British support, the Indian victories, and General Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers.
38. Grenier, First Way of War, 198–99; Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 145–48.
39. Brig. Gen. Rufus Putnam, Downes, 320.
40. Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 250–51; Harry G. Enoch, In Search of Morgan’s Station and “The Last Indian Raid in Kentucky” (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books 1997).
41. Grenier, First Way of War, 202; Taylor, Divided Ground, 283–88; Wayne to Secretary Henry Knox, Aug. 28. 1794, American State Papers, Class II, Indian Affairs, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–34), 1:490–91.
42. Kluger, Seizing Destiny, 223; White, Middle Ground, 464–73; Taylor, Divided Ground, 293–94.
10. THE CAPTURE AND RESCUE OF THE GIRLS
1. Report by John Williams to the Proprietors, Boonesborough, Jan. 3, 1776, in Ranck, 239.
2. Nancy O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses and Pioneer Strategies in the Historic Settlement Era,” in ed. Craig Thompson Friend, The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 71.
3. Peck, Boone, 105–6.
4. William Hickman, “Account of Life and Travels”; Nathan Reid’s undated ms., DM 31C[24–25]; and JDS’s interview with Josiah Collins, 1840s, DM 12 CC74.
5. “Col. William Fleming’s Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Mereness, 630.
6. James Galloway’s narrative, written in 1832 at his dictation by his grandson Albert Galloway, qtd. in Draper, 403. Galloway said Boonesborough had a dozen cabins. According to Ranck, there were twenty-six cabins at Boonesborough. Ranck, 35.
7. Draper, 404, reproduces an early engraving of Boonesborough.
8. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 32.
9. Draper, 403, 426.
10. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 37.
11. O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses,” 68.
12. Draper, 405, 431–32.
13. Ibid., 408.
14. Ibid., 407; Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 39.
15. Henry Stuart, brother of the British superintendent on Alabama and Georgia Indians John Stuart, witnessed the visit of the northern Indian delegation to the Cherokees. Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 191–96.
16. “Tired of the confinement of the fort”: Statement of Nathan Reid, DM 31C2[24–25].
17. William E. Ellis, The Kentucky River (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2000), 5.
18. JDS interview with Nathaniel Hart, Jr., c. 1843–44, DM 17CC192. Hart described “Simon” as a “a yellow man, who staid at the Fort.” He may have been someone who came to Boonesborough to trade with the settlers. Whites on the frontier were in frequent commercial and social contact with Indians, as exemplified by the story of Boone’s encounter with Saucy Jack at the shooting match in Salisbury, the Boones’ encounters with Big Jim and Hanging Maw, and the story of the Cherokees’ attendance at the Watauga Valley horse race at which Crabtree killed a Cherokee. In another account the girls initially mistook the man who “took hold of their canoe” as a Negro who had run away from Boonesborough. JDS interview with Richard French, c. 1840s, DM 12CC203.
19. MFDB, 38.
20. MFDB, 49.
21. Statement of Nathan Reid, n.d., DM 31C2[26].
22. Statement of Isaiah Boone, n.d., DM 31C2[40].
23. Statement of Nathan Reid, n.d., DM 31C2[26].
24. Ibid. [25–26].
25. MFDB, 50.
26. Draper interview with William Phelps, 1868, DM 24C57.
27. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C48–49.
28. Stephen Hempstead to Draper, Feb. 15, 1863, DM 16C76.
29. Draper interview with Jacob Boone, 1890, DM 14C84.
30. JDS interview with Josiah Collins, 1840s, DM 12CC75.
31. MFDB, 50.
32. Floyd to Preston, July 21, 1776, DM 33S300–303. The letter has been published a number of times, including in Otto A. Rothbert, “John Floyd—Pioneer and Hero,” FCHQ (July 1928): 171–72.
33. Richard Holder to Draper, Oct. 8, 1850, DM 24C29[1].
34. Floyd to Preston, July 21, 1776, DM 33S300–303.
35. Samuel H. Dixon to Draper, Feb. 3, 1852, DM 24C30[5].
36. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, May 2, 1885, DM 21C28–29. The story of the capture and the rescue of the girls has been told many times. Draper gathered some forty accounts of it—most of them furnished decades after the event. See Draper, 429–30 n. 35, for Draper’s sources for his version. Not surprisingly, the stories conflict in many details. For excellent efforts to thread the stories into a coherent narrative, see Faragher, 131–39; Draper, 411–21, 428–30, 432–33; Bakeless, 124–39. Boone himself was succinct in what he told Filson about the capture and rescue of the girls: “On the fourteenth day of July, 1776, two of Col. Calaway’s daughters, and one of mine, were taken prisoner near the fort. I immediately pursued the Indians, with only eight men, and on the sixteenth overtook them, killed two of the party, and recovered the girls.” Filson, 60.
37. Joseph D. Ketner, director of the Washington University Gallery of Art, qtd. in J. Grant Sweeney, The Columbus of the Woods: Daniel Boone and the Typology of Manifest Destiny (St. Louis: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1992), 54.
38. Ibid., 56.
39. JDS interview with Robert Wickliffe Sr., 1859, DM 15CC84.
40. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C49; see also Richard Holder to Draper, Oct. 8, 1850, DM 24C29[2].
41. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C48–49.
42. Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 12–13. See also Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., New Voyages to North-America by the Baron de Lahontan, 2 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1905), 2:453 (“A Young Woman, say they, is Master of her own Body, and by her Natural Right of Liberty is free to do what she pleases”); and Vernon Kinietz and Erminie W. Voegelin, eds., Shawnese Traditions: C. C. Trowbridge’s Account (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939), 15 (rape is considered criminal, though the woman’s relatives do not attempt to punish the offending man).
43. Statement of David Henry, n.d., DM 31C2[40], qtd. in Faragher, 139.
44. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, June 12, 1885, DM 21C48[1].
45. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 85, 90, 96–101, 328–31.
46. Floyd to Preston, July 21, 1776, DM 33S300–303. Part of the letter is printed in Hamble-ton Tapp, “Colonel John Floyd, Kentucky Pioneer,” FCHQ 15 (1941): 9; and in Draper, 423.
11. THE SHAWNEES CAPTURE BOONE
1. Draper, 424.
2. Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 44; Grenier, First Way of War, 152–53; Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 197–99; Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 186–88.
3. Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 198–200.
4. John Bakeless, Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott 1957), 36–41; Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 29–37.
5. Letter from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, dated July 4, 1774, DM 2JJ63–65, printed in DHDW, 66–67.
6. Henry Hamilton to Governor Carleton, Detroit, Nov. 30, 1775, DM 45J101–101(1), RUO, 129–30.
7. Henry Hamilton, “Reminiscences,” Henry Hamilton Papers (Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.) 92–95, qtd. in Sheehan, “‘The Famous Hair-Buyer General,’” 11.
8. Lt. Governor Hamilton to the Earl of Dartmouth, Detroit, Aug. 29–Sept. 2, 1776, Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 10 (1888): 269–70.
9. Lord Germain to Sir Guy Carleton, White Hall, Mar. 26, 1777, sent to Lieutenant Governor Hamilton from Quebec, May 21, 1777, printed in Butterfield, History of the Girtys, 342.
10. Faragher, 146; Draper, 442; Rice, Frontier Kentucky, 89–90. According to Draper, the census was on May 1, 1777.
11. Draper, 438.
12. Faragher, 146–47; Draper, 398 n. c (Belue’s note).
13. JDS interview with Sarah Graham, DM 12CC45.
14. Draper, 439.
15. MFDB, 51.
16. For Boone’s praise of Kenton, see Draper’s 1851 interview with John and Sarah Kenton McCord, DM 5S144. For accounts of the Apr. 24 attack, see JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 11CC12; Draper, 440–441; Faragher, 147–49; Lofaro, 79.
17. Filson, 61.
18. RUO, 65 nn. 95–96.
19. Lord George Germain to Sir Guy Carleton, White Hall, Mar. 26, 1777, and sent to Lieutenant Governor Hamilton from Quebec, May 21, 1777, in Butterfield, History of the Girtys, 343–44.
20. Extract of a Council held at Detroit, 17 June, 1777, DM 49J13, printed in FDUO, 9–10.
21. David Zeisberger to Col. George Morgan, Chuchachunk, July 7, 1777, DM 3NN11–13 (recounting a report from a messenger sent to Pluggy’s Town and Sandusky who encountered John Montour after the treaty at Detroit), FDUO, 18–19.
22. Extract of a Council held at Detroit, June 17, 1777, FDUO, 11–12.
23. Hamilton to American frontiersmen, Detroit, June 24, 1777, DM 45J2-D.S., FDUO, 14.
24. FDUO, 13.
25. E.g., David Zeisberger to Col. George Morgan—Cuchachunk, July 7, 1977, DM 3NN11–13, FDUO, 18; Capt. Matthew Arbuckle to Col. Wm Fleming, Fort Randolph July 26, DM 1U68, FDUO, 25 (reporting intelligence from a friendly Shawnee “that there has lately been a Treaty at Detroit, where all Nations have unanimously agreed to Distress the frontiers as much as in their Power. They accepted of the War Belt & Tomahawk and are so near as the Shawnee Towns, where they are indeavouring to draw over what Shawnees were resolved to remain Neuter they are Invited & Encouraged by a French Man & a Wyndott Chief who ac-companys them”).
26. Gen. Edward Hand to Jasper Yeates, Fort Pitt, July 12, 1777, in Thwaites and Kellogg, FDUO, 20 (“two Tribes of the Shawanese declare for us, two are against us, the Wiandats [Wyandots, an American name for the Huron Indians] also are evidently our Enemies”). According to an editors’ note, of the four Shawnee clans—the Chillicothe, Kiscapoo, Piqua, and Mequochoke—the first two, being farthest from American frontier and nearest the British sphere, were already hostile to the American settlers. There are many ways of spelling the names of these clans (sometimes referred to as divisions).
27. David Zeisberger to Gen. Edward Hand, Cuchachunk, July 26, 1777, DM 1U69, FDUO, 27–28.
28. Lieutenant Governor John Page to the Delawares, Williamsburg, Sept. 18, 1777, DM 1U97, FDUO, 88–89.
29. Gen. Edward Hand to the Delaware Chiefs at Coochocking &c, Fort Pitt, Oct. 1, 1777, DM 1U103, FDUO, 113.
30. Draper, 447.
31. Reminiscences by Dr. Joseph Doddridge, DM 6NN123–126, FDUO, 54.
32. JDS interview of John Hawks, c. 1840s, DM 12CC138.
33. Governor Patrick Henry to Gen. Edward Hand, Williamsburg, July 27, 1777, FDUO,32. (“Accounts from Kentucki tell me of the most distressing & deplorable condition of the surviving Inhabitants in that Quarter. Your Movements I trust will prove the best Defence to them. Two hundred men are ordered to their Assistance. But it seems to me, that offensive operations can alone produce Defence agt. Indians.”)
34. Capt. Samuel Moorhead to Gen. Edward Hand, James McKibbern’s House, Sept. 22, 1777, DM 1U101, FDUO, 97, 99.
35. Calendar of letters, DM1U127, Nov. 5, 1777, FDUO, 148.
36. Gen. Edward Hand to Governor Patrick Henry—Fort Pitt Nov. 9, 1777, DM 3NN 62, 63, FDUO, 154.
37. Report by John Williams to the Proprietors of the Transylvania Co., Boonesborough, Jan. 3, 1776, Ranck, 239.
38. For a full account of the efforts to organize the meeting at Fort Pitt, and the proceedings at the meeting (including the speeches of Cornstalk), see RUO, 25–127.
39. Gen. Edward Hand to Jasper Yeates, Fort Pitt, Oct. 2, 1777, Hand Papers, New York Public Library, FDUO, 119.
40. “Damnd. Savages”: Capt. Matthew Arbuckle to Capt. John Stuart, Fort Randolph, Nov. 2, 1776, DM 1U40, RUO, 211. Skepticism: Capt. Matthew Arbuckle to Col. Wm Fleming, Fort Randolph, Aug. 15, 1776, DM 2ZZ78, RUO, 187.
41. Narrative of Capt. John Stuart, DM 6NN157, FDUO, 159–60.
42. Col. William Preston to Col. William Fleming, Smithfield, Dec. 2, 1777, Thwaites and Kellogg, FDUO, 169.
43. Gen. Edward Hand to Jasper Yeates, Fort Pitt, Dec. 24, 1777, Hand Papers, New York Public Library, FDUO, 188–89.
44. Gen. Edward Hand to Governor Patrick Henry, Staunton, Dec. 9, 1777, DM 3NN69–71, FDUO, 175–76.
45. FDUO, 177–78 n. 43.
46. Col. John Bowman to Gen. Edward Hand, Harrodsburg, Dec. 12, 1777, DM 3NN192–196, Thwaites and Kellogg, FDUO, 182–83, Draper, 449–50.
47. Petition to the Virginia General Assembly, endorsed Nov. 25, 1777, Lofaro, 83, citing James Rood Robertson, ed., Petitions of the Early Inhabitants of Kentucky to the General Assembly of Virginia, 1769–1792 (Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton, 1914), 43.
48. Filson, 63; Draper, 459–60.
49. For accounts of Boone’s capture, see Filson, 63; Draper, 460–69; MFDB, 53–57; Faragher, 155–62; and Lofaro, 84–88.
50. MFDB, 55.
51. Ansel Goodman, petition for a Revolutionary War pension, Oct. 29, 1832, DM 11C28–30.
12. BOONE AMONG THE SHAWNEES
1. Draper interview with Joseph Jackson, 1844, DM 11C62[6]-[7], Draper, 465.
2. Statement of Boone Hays, Feb. 1846, DM 23C36[3–4], Faragher, 161; Draper, 466–67.
3. O. M. Spencer, a white held captive by the Shawnees in 1792–93, wrote that the Shawnees’ fondness for ornament extended to the men, who wore “heavy pieces of silver in the ears, the rims of which, being separated from the cartilage by cutting are weighed down two or three inches from the head.” Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Indian Captivity of O. M. Spencer—1834 (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley, 1917), qtd. in Howard, Shawnee! 69.
4. Diary of David McClure, Oct. 28 and 29, 1772, 102. McClure said the ear slitting was said to be a preparation “necessary for a warrior.”
5. Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 49–50.
6. The Delaware war chief Buckongahelas, whose ring-weighted earlobes reached his shoulders, would suck on his stretched earlobes while listening to others. White, Middle Ground, 495.
7. Filson, 63.
8. Draper interview with Joseph Jackson, 1844, DM 11C62[8–10], Draper, 467; Faragher, 161.
9. MFDB, 57.
10. Kinietz and Voegelin, Shawnese Traditions, 19–21; Howard, Shawnee, 120–25. Trow-bridge’s manuscript is dated July 24, 1824. Trowbridge records that there used to be a hereditary society headed by four old women who, whenever they heard the “prisoners yell” of a returning war party, would paint their lips with red clay and set out to meet the party. If one of these women touched a prisoner before one of the peace women did, the prisoner “was taken to the village & burned and afterwards cooked & eaten” (54–55). According to another informant, the society’s members ate the bodies of prisoners who were not adopted by the Shawnees, and did so “as a kind of sacrifice, out of bowls formed of the sculls of former victims” (64).
11. Charles Johnston, qtd. in Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 210.
12. Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 86 (Alexander Henry quoting a Chippewa who, in 1763, brought in cooked flesh from slain captives and said “it had always been the custom, among all the Indian nations when returning from war, to make a war feast from among the slain”).
13. Filson, 63.
14. John Warth, qtd. in J. P. Hale, “Daniel Boone, Some Facts and Incidents not Hitherto Published,” West Virginia School Journal 2, no. 4 (Feb. 1882): 85–86, cited in Faragher, 165. Warth’s story, as recounted by Hale, is somewhat garbled, referring to the killing, not of the son but of the father, of a “noted brave named Cat Fish.” A transcript of Hale’s account is on the West Virginia Archives and History Web site, www.wvculture.org/History/settlement/ boonedaniel02.html.
15. Peck, 73.
16. Orley E. Brown, ed., The Captivity of Jonathan Alder and His Life with the Indians (Alliance, Ohio: n.p., 1965), 14. James Smith gave a similar description of his adoption by the Caughnawagas in 1755 (though the three squaws washing me “plunged me under water and washed and rubbed me severely, I could not say they hurt me much”). Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 32.
17. Kinietz and Voegelin, Shawnese Traditions, 56. See also Jerry E. Clark, The Shawnee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 28–29 (the group that bore the name Turtle had the honor of carrying the Shawnees’ sacred bundle).
18. Kinietz and Voegelin, Shawnese Traditions, 2. This tradition appears to have been collected by Trowbridge from Tecumseh’s brother the Prophet.
19. For a summary of the available information about the salt-boilers—those adopted by the Indians and those sold to the British—see Ted Franklin Belue, “Terror in the Canelands: The Fate of Daniel Boone’s Salt Boilers,” FCHQ 68 (1994): 3.
20. Governor Henry Hamilton to Sir Guy Carleton, Detroit, Apr. 25, 1778, DM 11C96(3), printed in FDUO, 283.
21. Filson, 64.
22. Durrett Collection, University of Chicago, Codex 127B:196–97, qtd. in Faragher, 169.
23. MFDB, 57.
24. Trabue, 64.
25. For how each of the prisoners fared, see Belue, “Terror in the Canelands.”
26. Filson, 102.
27. Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 24–27; Draper, 473–74; Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig (1866), DM 30C54; JDS interview with Josiah Collins, c. 1840s, DM 12CC:76–77 (says Pequolly means “Little Shuts-his-eyes”).
28. Kinietz and Voegelin, Shawnese Traditions, 9, 55, 67 (many Delaware words are like the Shawnee, and “frequent intercourse has enabled them to communicate with each other on ordinary subjects”).
29. Filson, 64–65.
30. MFDB, 59.
31. Bakeless, 371. (See DM 6S228; 16C28.)
32. MFDB, 60.
33. Thomas Wildcat Alford, Civilization as Told to Florence Drake (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936), 20. Alford had gone to a white school, and his rendering of Shawnee ethical principles may have reflected his Christian education.
34. Ibid., 53.
35. Aron, How the West Was Lost.
36. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, May 3, 1887, DM 21C63[1–2]; Coshow to Draper, Mar. 14 and Apr. 23, 1885, DM 21C24[12–13] and 21C33[2].
37. Kinietz and Voegelin, Shawnese Traditions, 34.
38. Filson, 105.
39. Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 103, 105 (the youngest of three Indian women Cresswell met at their camp at night “had some amorous design upon me [and] began to creep nearer me and pulled my Blanket. I found what she wanted and lifted it up. She was young, handsome, and healthy. Fine regular features and fine eyes, had she not painted them with Red before she came to bed”), 108, 113–14 ( “Our Squaws are very necessary, fetching our horses to the Camp and saddling them, making our fire at night and cooking our victuals, and every other thing they think will please us”).
40. Diary of David McClure, Sept. 13, 1772, 53. A trader with an Indian consort would benefit by access to Indian kinship networks. White, Middle Ground, 324.
41. For how women outnumbered men in some Indian groups, see White, Middle Ground, 66.
42. JDS interview with Josiah Collins, Bath County, Ky., c. 1840s, DM 12CC67.
43. Trabue, 47.
44. Col. William Preston and Col. William Fleming to the Chiefs and Warriors of the Shawnese Nation, Va., Apr. 3, 1778, DM 2ZZ44, reprinted in FDUO, 258–61.
45. Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 7, 12–15.
46. See JDS interview with Josiah Collins, c. 1840s, DM 12CC64.
47. Filson, 65.
48. Hurt, Ohio Frontier, 29 (reporting killings by Wyandots and Delawares of white captive women who made unsuccessful escape attempts).
49. Ephraim McLain to Draper, May 17, 1884, DM 16C7[1]-7[2]; see also McLain to Draper, June 9, 1884, DM 16C8 (“Boone himself told me about drawing the bullets from the Indians guns”).
50. Filson, 65–66.
51. Ibid., 66.
52. DM 4B176, Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 27.
53. Filson, 66.
54. “You may depend on it”: Draper interview with Henry Wilson, n.d., DM 31C2[72]. According to Wilson, Boone shot a deer. In some accounts the animal Boone killed was a buffalo. For the story of Boone’s escape, see MFDB, 61–62; Draper, 479–81; Faragher, 174–76.
55. Draper, 480. See JDS interview with Josiah Collins, c. 1840s, 12CC64 (around May 1, 1778, “Mrs. Danl. Boone, supposing her husband dead, ret’d w. her family fr. Bh. to Carolina”).
56. MFDB, 60.
13. THE SIEGE OF BOONESBOROUGH
1. Trabue, 57.
2. Filson, 66.
3. Trabue, 61.
4. For the strengthening of the fort’s defenses, see Draper’s interview with Moses Boone, DM 19C12; Draper, 495–96; Filson, 66; MFDB, 65; Faragher, 177–78.
5. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 40–41.
6. Trabue, 57.
7. Deposition of Capt. William Buchanan, Nov. 26, 1778, DM 14S18–19; Doddridge, Notes, 277, qtd. in Faragher, 178.
8. Robert Hancock to Draper, February 26, 1853, DM 24C17(2–3); deposition of William Hancock, July 17, 1778, DM 4B204–5.
9. Boone to Col. Arthur Campbell or Evan Shelby, Boonesborough, July 18, 1778, DM 4B204, printed in Draper, 180.
10. Faragher, 180.
11. Trabue, 57.
12. For the Paint Creek raid, see Filson, 67; Faragher, 181–82; Draper, 498–500.
13. Notice from a Williamsburg paper of Oct. 9, 1778, reprinted in Draper, 522.
14. Felix Walker’s narrative of his trip with Boone from Long Island to Boonesborough in Mar. 1775, written about 1824, reprinted in Ranck, 167.
15. For accounts of the siege, see Filson, 67–70; Draper’s interview with Moses Boone, 1846, DM 19C10 ff.; Draper, 500–518; MFDB, 65–70; Faragher, 182–99; Trabue, 58–59; Lofaro, 96–104. For estimates of the number of attackers, Indians and Canadians, ranging between 338 and 1,000, but clustering in the 400s, see Draper, 522. Filson’s Boone names the French Canadian officer “Capt. Duquesne”; Draper refers to him as “Capt. Isadore DeChaine” and says he was an interpreter for the British among the Wyandots; Faragher gives his name as Lt. Antoine Dagneaux de Quindre. There may well have been two French Canadians, Chêne and de Quindre. Bakeless reports that both were frequently mentioned in official correspondence and carried on Hamilton’s strength report for Sept. 5, 1778. Bakeless, 450 n. 202.2.
16. JDS interview with Josiah Collins, c. 1840s, DM 12CC74.
17. The letters have not survived, but settlers who were at the siege remembered their contents. See, e.g., MFDB, 65–66.
18. JDS interview with Daniel Boone Bryan, 1844, DM 22C14[12].
19. Trabue, 58; Draper, 501.
20. Filson, 68.
21. JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 11CC13.
22. The boy was Samuel South. JDS interview with Jesse Daniel, c. 1843, DM 11CC94.
23. JDS interview with Nathaniel Hart, Jr., c. 1843–44, DM 17CC198.
24. William Bailey Smith, in Hunt’s Western Review, clipping in DM 31C2[87].
25. Draper interview with John Gass, 1844, DM 24C73[2].
26. JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 11CC13.
27. Thomas D. Clark, ed., The Voice of the Frontier: John Bradford’s Historical Notes on Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 19.
28. Draper, 502–3; Faragher, 186.
29. Interview with Moses Boone, DM 19C11.
30. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, Mar. 14 and 28, 1885, DM 21C24[6], 21C27.
31. Filson, 68; see MFDB, 66.
32. Filson, 69; MFDB, 66.
33. Interview with Nathan and Olive Boone, 1851, DM 6S142; Interview with Moses Boone, DM 19C11–13.
34. JDS interview with Daniel Boone Bryan, 1844, 22C14[12].
35. Peck, 55, 59–60. Peck interviewed Boone several times toward the end of Boone’s life. With respect to the agreement to submit to British authorities in Canada and to pledge allegiance to the British Crown, Peck said he relied “on oral testimony to the writer from Stephen Hancock and Flanders Callaway.” See also Draper interview with John Gass, 1844, DM 24C73[4] (under the treaty the Boonesborough people were “agreeing to become subject to the British Governor of Detroit”).
36. Filson, 69.
37. Ibid.
38. Trabue, 58. For the Indian custom of locking arms at a treaty signing, see Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 158 (at the signing in 1790 in New York City of a treaty between the Creeks and the United States, the Creek chiefs at Federal Hall “shook hands with Washington Indian-style, locking arms while grasping elbows”).
39. MFDB, 67. According to Moses Boone, the blow was with the pipe end, perhaps intended to stun Boone so he could be taken prisoner. DM 19C13[1].
40. Draper interview with Moses Boone, 1846, DM 11CC12–14.
41. Draper interview with Moses Boone, 1846, DM 19C15–16.
42. Draper interview with Richard French, c. 1840s, DM 12CC205.
43. Draper interview with Moses Boone, 1846, DM 19C15.
44. JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 11CC13.
45. DM 6S138, 142; MFDB, 69.
46. Note by Ted Franklin Belue, ed., in Draper, 529 n. n.
47. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, Mar. 28, 1885, 21C27[1].
48. See, e.g., Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 51 (Fort Granville surrenders in 1756 after Indians set fire to the walls of the fort), 224 (Fort Presque Isle surrenders after Indians use fire arrows to set its bastions and buildings on fire).
49. JDS interview with John Rankins, c. 1840s, DM 11CC83. John Dabney Shane, a Presbyterian minister, noted that “habitual swearers think no sentence smooth and euphonious, which is not filled up in their style,” but he omitted blasphemous expressions from his retelling of frontier stories on the ground that introducing such expressions “is certainly repugnant to good taste, and renders the narrative obnoxious to persons of refined and Christian feeling.”
50. JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 11CC13.
51. JDS interview with Daniel Boone Bryan, 1844, DM 22C10[9]; Samuel Willard to Rev. Thomas P. Hinds, Oct. 14, 1844, DM 24C112[3].
52. Filson, 69–70; JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 24C73[9].
53. MFDB, 68–69.
54. Draper interview with Nathan and Olive Boone, 1851, DM 6S138, 6S143; JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 24C73[9], 11CC12–14.
55. M. B. Woods to Draper, Apr. 9, 1883, DM 4C22[11–12]; see Faragher, 196; Draper, 516, 530. Sometimes Boone is said to have killed the saucy Indian.
56. Draper, 513; Trabue, 59.
57. JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 24C73[9], 11CC14, Draper interview with Moses Boone, 1846, DM 19C18. On who killed Pompey, see Ted Franklin Belue, “Did Daniel Boone Shoot Pompey, the Black Shawnee, at the 1778 Siege of Boonesborough?” FCHQ 67 (1993): 5–22.
58. Draper interview with Moses Boone, 1846, DM 19D21–22.
59. Trabue, 59.
60. JDS interview with Richard French, c. 1840s, DM 12CC205.
61. John N. James interview with Simon Kenton, c. 1833, DM 11C77–78.
62. Filson, 70.
63. JDS, interview with Daniel Boone Bryan, 1844, DM 22C14[12].
64. For Trabue’s account of Boone’s court-martial, see Trabue, 63–64.
65. Faragher, 201.
66. John H. James to Draper, DM 11C76.
67. Kincaid, Wilderness Road, 158.
68. JDS interview with John Gass, 1840s, DM 11CC15.
69. Draper, 558; DM 50J12.
70. JDS interview with Richard French, c. 1840s, DM 12CC205 (describing views of Callaway’s daughter).
71. Filson, 73.
72. Under the new land law those who “have really and bona fide settled themselves or their families” or bore the cost of settling others “upon any waste or unappropriated lands on the… western waters, to which no other person hath any legal right or claim,” before Jan. 1, 1778, are entitled to four hundred acres per family settled (the tract to include the settlement that had been made). Settlers seeking additional land would have a preemption on up to one thousand acres of adjoining land at the current state sale price—on land to which no other person has any legal right or claim. No family was to be entitled to the allowance granted to settlers under the act, “unless they have made a crop of corn in that country, or resided there at least one year since the time of their settlement.” In addition, persons who before Jan. 1, 1778, “had marked out or chosen for themselves any waste or unappropriated lands, and built any house or hut, or made other improvements thereon” would be allowed to preempt one thousand acres on the same basis as the preemption rights of persons entitled to four hundred–acre settlements. Persons coming to Kentucky after Jan. 1, 1778, were limited to the preemption “of any quantity of land, not exceeding four hundred acres.” William W. Hening, Statutes of Virginia, 10:39–41. See Charles Gano Talbert, Benjamin Logan: Kentucky Frontiersman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press 1962), 85, for a summary of the law, which is excerpted in Chinn, Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 225–26.The law also provided for the sale of treasury warrants, initially at the price of £40 per hundred acres, that could be used for the purchase of the unclaimed land.
73. Col. William Fleming, one of the commissioners, noted in his journal for May 5, 1780, how much the land commission had by then accomplished: 1,328 claimers, 1,334,050 acres granted: 140,250 acres to 351 claimers on preemption; 423,000 acres to 423 claimers for improvements before 1778; 770,800 acres to 554 claimants for settlement and preemption before 1778. Mereness, 645–46. Fleming traded on some claims for his own account. He recorded in his journal, e.g.: “Purchased a preemption of 1000 Acres from Henry Bauchman heir at Law to Jacob Bauchman for £200. Sold the above to Jacob Mors for £500.” Mereness, 654.
74. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 71. Neil Hammon has advised the author that the total amount of acreage entered in Kentucky County, which at the time included all of what is now the state of Kentucky, was for 3.75 million acres. That is more than 14% of the total area of Kentucky.
75. JDS interview with William Clinkenbeard, 1840s, DM 11CC55.
76. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 48–49.
77. Clark used the same threat in convincing Hamilton to surrender that Hamilton had tried without success in his letter to the besieged Boonesborough defenders: if we have to storm the fort, Clark told Hamilton, “many of course would be cut down, and the consequences of an enraged body of woodsmen breaking into the fort must be obvious to him. It would be beyond the power of an American officer to save a single man.” Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 145.
78. For Clark’s campaigns, see Bakeless, Background to Glory.
79. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 47–48.
80. Ibid., 32.
81. William Fleming, “Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Mereness, 626–27.
82. John Floyd to William Preston, evidently June 1780, DM 17CC182–83. These letters from Floyd to Preston are published in Kathleen Jennings, Louisville’s First Families: A Series of Genealogical Sketches (Louisville: Standard Printing, 1920).
83. Fleming, “Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Mereness, 622.
84. Ibid., 641.
85. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, 16th ed. (Rahway, N.J.: Merck Research Laboratories, 1992), 974–75.
86. Fleming, “Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1783,” in Mereness, 697.
87. Statement of Mrs. Rachel Denton, n.d., DM 31C2[96].
88. Fleming, “Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Mereness, 628, 636.
89. John Floyd to William Preston, Dec. 19, 1779, DM 17CC123.
90. Fleming, “Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Mereness, 627, 630.
91. Trabue, 74–75.
92. Fleming, “Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Mereness, 647–48.
93. Statement of Mrs. Rachel Denton, n.d., DM 31C2[96].
94. The move to Marble Creek may not have happened until 1783. Neil Hammon has informed the author that the land on Marble Creek, obtained by Boone and William Hays, was surveyed on Jan. 25, 1783.
95. Faragher, 206.
96. Contract between Boone and Geddes Winston, Dec. 17, 1781, DM 25C78, qtd. in Faragher, 207. Neil Hammon has advised the author he has found no record that Boone received the two thousand acres referred to in the contract.
97. MFDB, 70–71; Faragher, 207–8; Lofaro, 111. Neal O. Hammon has reviewed a document relating to an Apr. 11, 1781, court hearing in Fayette County, listing the certificates relating to seventeen claims (belonging to fifteen men) taken in the theft, which Boone said occurred at the house of Adam Byrd of James City County on the night of Mar. 20, 1780. Hammon said that the money required to purchase warrants on these claims would have totaled £6,061. Hammon, “The Boone Robbery” (ms., n.d.; copy in the author’s possession). Hammon has advised the author that a land certificate, issued by the land commission, would state that a specified person had proved entitlement to a certain amount of land at a specified location. The certificate had to be returned to the land office at Williamsburg (later, at Richmond) and a prescribed amount of money paid for the land warrants, which then were entered in the office of the county surveyor, who would appoint a deputy to survey the tract.
98. Thomas Hart to Nathaniel Hart, Aug. 3, 1780, in Bakeless, 245–46.
99. Faragher, 208–9.
14. INDIAN RAIDS AND THE BATTLE OF THE BLUE LICKS
1. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 204.
2. Ibid., 205–19.
3. Bakeless, 246–47.
4. Ibid., 249; Trabue, 80–81.
5. Butterfield, History of the Girtys, 119.
6. JDS interview with Mrs. John Morrison, ca. 1840s, DM 11CC153 (“powder burnt”); Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 199.
7. Filson, 72; Faragher, 210; JDS interview with William Clinkenbeard, c. 1840s, 11CC66.
8. Clark to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 22, 1780, George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771–1781, James Alton James, ed. (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1912), Virginia Series, 3:451.
9. For different accounts of Ned Boone’s killing, see, e.g., Filson, 73; MFDB, 71–72; Faragher, 211–13; Bakeless, Boone, 256–58; Houston, 18–19; E. B. Scholl to Draper, Jan. 5, 1856, DM 23C104; deposition of Peter Scholl (Ned Boone’s son-in-law; one of those who pursued the Indians after the killing), Apr. 17, 1818, DM 7 C 84–87. For “we’ve killed Daniel Boone,” see Thomas S. Bouchelle to Draper, July 28, 1884, DM 9C68[5]; and Draper’s notes of his interview with Joseph Jackson, 9C68[5]. For the story of Ned’s resemblance to Daniel Boone, see Silas W. Parris to Draper, Oct. 15, 1884, DM 2C53.
10. John Floyd to William Preston, May 5, 1780, DM 17CC125.
11. John May to Samuel Beall, Apr. 15, 1780, Beall-Booth Family Papers, Manuscript Collections, Filson Historical Society.
12. John Redd to Draper, c. 1848, DM 10NN101, qtd. in Draper, 181 n. b.
13. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 281–82.
14. Bakeless, 259, 454 (“Colonel”); MFDB, 73 (“Captain”).
15. MFDB, 73.
16. William Christian to William Preston, June 30, 1781, qtd. in Faragher, 213; Draper interview with Nathan and Olive Boone, 1851, DM 6S151.
17. Bakeless, 260; Faragher, 214.
18. John Floyd to Thomas Jefferson, Apr. 10, 1781, CVSP, 2: 47–49.
19. Bakeless, 261.
20. John Floyd to Gen. George Rogers Clark, Aug. 10, 1781, George Rogers Clark Papers, Virginia Series, 3:584–85, qtd. by Hambleton Tapp, “Colonel John Floyd, Kentucky Pioneer,” FCHQ 15 (Jan. 1941): 17.
21. John Floyd to William Preston, Sept. 30, 1781, DM 17CC137–38, Hammon and Harris, “Letters of Floyd,” 228.
22. For the personal dynamics underlying the Pennsylvania militia’s decision to kill the Christian Indians, see Rob Harper, “Looking the Other Way: The Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of Violence,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (July 2007): 621–54.
23. Butterfield, History of the Girtys, 176–189, 365–67; Bakeless, Background to Glory, 286–87; Bakeless, Boone, 264.
24. Butterfield, History of the Girtys, 180.
25. Lofaro, 122; Butterfield, History of the Girtys, 190–91, 372–73. Butterfield believes the speech was fictitious, noting that Girty was illiterate and that if the speech was had been made, it would have been given in an Indian language. History of the Girtys, 191 n.
26. Filson, 74; Bakeless, 269–71.
27. For accounts of the attack on Bryan’s Station, see, e.g., Filson, 75; Bakeless, 274–287; Faragher, 216; Lofaro, 123–25; Neal O. Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks (Minneapolis: Boone Society, 2005), 21–28.
28. Bakeless, 285–87.
29. McKee to De Peyster, Shawanese Country, Aug. 28, 1782, qtd. in Bakeless, 291.
30. JDS interview with Sarah Graham, c. 1840s, DM 12CC45.
31. Peck, 91.
32. Bakeless, 288; Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks, 39.
33. Boone, qtd. in Robert Wickliffe, “The Life of Col. John Todd,” MS, c 1840s, DM 5C51[8], qtd. in Faragher, 217.
34. Deposition of Benjamin A. Cooper, Nov. 8, 1836, qtd. in Faragher, 217.
35. William Caldwell to Major De Peyster, Aug. 26, 1782, Haldimand Papers, ser. B, 123:127, qtd. in Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks, 90.
36. Boone, qtd. in Robert Wickliffe, “The Life of Col. John Todd,” MS, c. 1840s, DM 5C51[8–9].
37. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C61–63. In Hammon’s view there was no officers’ conference before crossing the river. He notes that many accounts of the conference were written decades after the battle and that accounts written soon after the battle by Daniel Boone and Levi Todd did not mention such a conference. Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks, 50–54. Hammon suggests that McGary was less blameworthy than many have written for urging the Kentuckians to attack across the river. It is significant, however, that McGary himself, in a letter to Colonel Logan written soon after the battle, wrote of being “much sensured for incouraging the men to fight the Indians when we came up with them.” McGary to Col. Benjamin Logan, Aug. 28, 1782, DM 12J35–37, qtd. in Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks, 87. In addition, Arthur Campbell within weeks of the battle said the loss of life at the battle was “not a little thro the vain and seditious expressions of a Major McGeary [sic].” Campbell to Col. William Davies, Washington County, Va., Oct. 3, 1782, CVSP 3:337, qtd. in Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks, 94–95.
38. Houston, 24.
39. Neal Hammon believes that Boone never made such a suggestion: “The idea that Boone was so foolish as to even suggest that they divide the army is insulting to the old pioneer.” Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks, 77.
40. JDS interview with Jacob Stevens, c. 1840s, DM 12CC134–35.
41. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C61–63.
42. Rebecca Boone Lamond to Draper, Aug. 23, 1845, DM 22C36.
43. Draper interview with Joseph Scholl, 1868, DM 24S214.
44. MFDB, 76; Houston, 25. Cf. Peck, 86.
45. Draper interview with Samuel Boone, 1868, DM 22S265.
46. Rebecca Boone Lamond to Draper, Aug. 23, 1845, DM 22C36.
47. MFDB, 76.
48. MFDB, 76–77.
49. Filson, 77.
50. Ibid., 77–78.
51. JDS interview with Jacob Stevens, c. 1840s, DM 12CC134–35, qtd. in Faragher, 222.
52. MFDB, 78; Filson, 77.
53. Draper interview with Joseph Scholl, 1868, DM 24S213.
54. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C63.
55. Boone to Governor Benjamin Harrison, Sept. 11, 1782, printed in Lofaro, 130.
56. McKee to De Peyster, Shawanese Country, Aug. 28, 1782.
57. Boone to Governor Benjamin Harrison, Aug. 30, 1782, Virginia State Archives. The letter is qtd. in Bakeless, 308; and in Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks, 88–89.
58. Talbert, Benjamin Logan, 168.
59. Ibid., 177–78.
60. Filson, 78–79.
61. Talbert, Benjamin Logan, 179.
62. The Kentuckian was Cave Johnson. See Talbert, Benjamin Logan, 179–80.
63. Benjamin Harrison to George Rogers Clark, Jan. 13, 1783, DM 52J73(2).
64. Filson, 80–81.
65. Ibid., 79.
66. O’Malley, “Frontier Defenses,” 71–72. O’Malley notes that although life became more serene in the central Kentucky region around Lexington, northern Kentucky along the Ohio River continued to be dangerous
67. JDS interview with John Rankins, c. 1840s, DM 11CC81. For the timing of “settling out” at different Kentucky stations, see Perkins, Border Life, 161–62.
68. Filson, 28–29. The Census Bureau estimated Kentucky’s population in 1780 at forty-five thousand. Historical Statistics, pt. 2, 1168.
69. Historical Statistics, pt. 1, 32.
70. General Harmar had his men at Fort Harmar, near Marietta, Ohio, count the boats and settlers coming down the Ohio: from Oct. 10, 1786, to May 12, 1787, 177 boats with 2,689 people; from June 1, 1787, to Dec. 9, 1787, 146 boats and 3,296 people; and from Dec. 9, 1787, to June 15, 1788, 308 boats and 6,320 persons. White, Middle Ground, 418.
15. WHITES AND INDIANS
1. Harry Innes to Henry Knox, July 7, 1790, Innes Papers. Vol. 19, no. 113, Talbert, Benjamin Logan, 247. Parts of the letter are reprinted in Thomas D. Clark, Voice of the Frontier, 134–35.
2. Clark, Voice of the Frontier, 110.
3. Harry Innes to John Brown, Dec. 7, 1787, reprinted in RKHS 54 (Oct. 1956): 369 (between Sept. 1783 and Dec. 1787, three hundred Kentuckians were killed and twenty thousand horses stolen).
4. Clark, Voice of the Frontier, 111.
5. Historical Statistics, pt. 1, 32.
6. “A Narrative of the Incidents Attending the Capture, Detention and Ransom of Charles Johnston,” in Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 197.
7. John Floyd to William Preston, Mar. 28, 1783, DM 17CC144–48, reprinted in Hammon and Harris, “Letters of Floyd,” 234.
8. Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 109.
9. Clark, Voice of the Frontier, 86.
10. Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 126.
11. Charles Johnston, May’s assistant, was on the boat and was taken captive. Johnston, recounting in 1827 the capture of the boat and the shooting of May, said they happened in Feb. 1790. Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 184.
12. Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 246; Jemima Hawkins to Draper, c. 1863, DM 19S93.
13. The captive was Thomas Brown. Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 70.
14. MFDB, 81; Faragher, 252–53.
15. Account of Col. Josiah Harmar, Nov. 15, 1786, CVSP, 4:204–5, qtd. in Downes, 298; Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 177.
16. JDS interview with Isaac Clinkenbeard, c. 1840s, DM 11CC3.
17. Faragher, 253–54; Lofaro, 138–39. McGary may have lost his commission for only a year. CVSP, 4:258–60.
18. Butterfield, History of the Girtys, 252–53.
19. Grenier, First Way of War, 39–43 (laws for scalp bounties in Virginia and Massachu-setts; bounties paid by Massachusetts to a white woman for the ten Abenaki scalps she took from the Indians whom she killed in escaping from them).
20. Quaife, Capture of Old Vincennes, 165.
21. Ibid., 194.
22. William Clinkenbeard to JDS, c. 1843, DM 11CC54–66.
23. McConnell, Country Between, 194–95; Grenier, First Way of War, 144–45 (quoting Bouquet’s reply: “I will try to inoculate the bastards with Some Blankets that may fall in their Hands”).
24. Journal of William Trent for June 24, 1763, qtd. in Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 73.
25. Capt. Samuel Moorhead to Gen. Edward Hand, James McKibbern’s House, Sept. 22, 1777, DM 1U101, FDUO, 97, 99.
26. Lieutenant Governor Zenon Trudeau to Baron de Carondelet, Sept. 28, 1793, qtd. in Gilbert C. Din and Abraham P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1983), 249 n. 71.
27. Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 69–70. See A. Gwynn Henderson, “The Lower Shawnee Town on Ohio: Sustaining Native Autonomy in an Indian ‘Republic,’” in Friend, Buzzel about Kentuck, 35, 38–44, for the increasing use of European artifacts and the importance of trade (first with the French, then with the Pennsylvanians) at the Lower Shawnee Town (where the Scioto meets the Ohio) in the mid-1750s.
28. McConnell, Country Between, 211–20; White, Middle Ground, 137–38, 482 (by around 1800 most of the Indians in the region were making only their moccasins—and doing so with European awls).
29. JDS interview with Benjamin Stites, 1842, DM 13CC60. Stites, who bought the cappo, said he had to freeze it “to get the lice out.” According to Stites, the Indians frequently wore cappos on their raids. The Indian who killed Stites’s uncle “had a cappo and a cocked hat, he must have gotten at St. Clair’s defeat.” DM 13CC65.
30. Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 12.
31. Sheehan, “‘The Famous Hair Buyer General,’” 18, quoting Fernando de Leyba to Bernardo de Galvez, July 11 and 21, 1778, in Clark-Leyba Papers, ed. Lawrence Kinnaird, American Historical Review 41 (Oct. 1935): 95, 98.
32. For increased animosity of Virginians and Pennsylvanians toward Indians as a result of Indian raids during the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War, see Ward, Breaking the Back-country, 236–40, 256. Grenier argues persuasively, however, that British settlers, from the first settlements of America, waged all-out war against Indians, including destruction of crops and killing of women and children. Grenier, First Way of War. See also Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973; rpt., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 69–93, on the killings of the Pequots in 1637 (76: Captain Underwood, noting the killing of women and children, said: “We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings”), and on King Philip’s War (1675–78).
33. The Presbyterian minister David McClure in 1772, among the Delawares on the Muskingum, had difficulty convincing a young man who had been a captive since he was nine to rejoin his family in Pennsylvania. McClure observed: “There is an unknown charm in the Indian life, which surprisingly attaches white people; those especially who have been captivated in early life. Whether it is, that uncontrouled liberty, which is found among savages, or that freedom from all anxiety and care for futurity, which they appear to enjoy, or that love of ease, which is so agreeable to the indolence of human nature, or all these combined, the fact is established by numerous instances of english & french captives, who have resisted the most affectionate and inviting allurements to draw them and chose to spend their days among their adopted Indian friends.” Diary of David McClure, Oct. 7, 1772, 88.
34. Merrell, Into the American Woods, 94.
35. Remarks of Lawoughwa, May 10, 1763, Pennsylvania Colonial Records, 9:259–60, reprinted in Downes, 122. For a summary of how Ohio Valley Indians treated the many captives they took during the French and Indian War—killing some but treating most “very kindly”—and of the reluctance of many of the longtime captives to return to the white world, see Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 52–55, 210–11, 250 (Col. Henry Bouquet reports that the Shawnees returning white captives to him in 1764 “were obliged to bind several of their prisoners and force them along to the camp; and some women who had been delivered up, afterwards found means to escape and run back to the Indian towns”).
36. Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 134.
37. For excerpts from A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, see Drimmer, Captured by the Indians, 142–82.
38. White, Middle Ground, 500–501.
39. Belue reconstructed the later lives of the captive salt boilers in his article “Terror in the Canelands: The Fate of Daniel Boone’s Salt Boilers,” FCHQ 68 (1994): 3. Belue’s account is based in substantial part on Draper, 481–84.
40. DM 24C135(2), Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 11 n. 22.
41. JDS interview with John Gass, c. 1840s, DM 11CC15.
42. Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 14–15. For surveys by Boone on which Micajah Callaway was one of the chainmen, see Neal O. Hammon and James Russell Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor: Old Images and New Realities,” RKHS 102 (2004): 563–66.
43. Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 16–17; Draper, 482.
44. Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 22.
45. MFDB, 119.
46. Belue, “Terror in the Canelands,” 23–24; Faragher, 165, 313.
47. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C67.
48. Francis Baily, Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 & 1797, ed. Jack D. L. Holmes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 116.
49. Filson, 66–67.
50. Draper interview with John Shaw, 1855, qtd. in Faragher, 300.
51. Peck, 138.
52. Draper interview with Joseph McCormick, 1871, DM 30C110–13. The advice is consistent with the advice of Conrad Weiser, who for many years was Pennsylvania’s interpreter and intermediary with the Delawares, Iroquois, Shawnees, and other Indians: “A European who wishes to stand well with them, must practice well the three following virtues. They are—(1) Speak the truth (2) Give the best that he has (3) Show himself not a coward, but courageous in all cases.” Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 201.
53. Faragher, 250–51.
54. Boone’s Indian account books were reprinted in David I. Bushnell, Jr., “Daniel Boone at Limestone, 1786–1787,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 25 (1917): 1–11.
55. Virginia Gazette of Apr. 19, 1787, qtd. in Bushnell, “Daniel Boone at Limestone,” 1–2.
56. Faragher, 258–59; Bakeless, 318–19. On Boone’s telling Chloe Finn that he would take her home, see Boone Ballard to Draper, Dec. 6, 1882, DM 14C50[1].
57. Boone to Col. Robert Patterson, Mar. 16, 1787, DM 26C176–76(1).
58. Major Wall to the Shawnees at a prisoner exchange at the Falls of the Ohio in May 1783, Correspondence and Papers of Governor-General Sir Frederick Haldiman, 1758–91, British Museum, London, Additional Manuscript 21779, 117, qtd. in Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 174.
59. Faragher, 256–58; Bakeless, 321; Lofaro, 139; Talbert, Benjamin Logan, 219–20.
60. JDS interview with Col. Thomas Jones, c. 1840s, DM 12CC233.
61. White, Middle Ground.
62. John Warth, qtd. in J. P. Hale, “Daniel Boone, Some Facts and Incidents not Hitherto Published,” West Virginia School Journal 2, no. 4 (Feb. 1882): 85–86, cited in Faragher, Boone, 165.
16. TRADING AND LAND SPECULATION
1. Downes, 291. Cornplanter had sought more land: “We Indians love our lands, we warriors must have a large country to range in, indeed our subsistence must depend on our having much hunting ground.”
2. Dorman, 21.
3. Notes by Nathan Reid, Jr., of conversations with his father Nathan Reid, in Draper, 407.
4. Rev. David Rice, the father of Presbyterianism in Kentucky, writing of his first visit to Kentucky in the early 1780s; Robert H. Bishop, ed., An Outline of the History of the Church in the State of Kentucky, During a Period of Forty Years: Containing the Memoirs of Rev. David Rice, and Sketches of the Origin and Present State of Particular Churches, and of the Lives and Labours of a Number of Men Who Were Eminent and Useful in Their Day (Lexington, 1824), 36, qtd. in Aron, How the West Was Lost, 80.
5. John Breckenridge to James Breckenridge, Jan. 29, 1786, James Breckenridge Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, qtd. in Marion Nelson Winship, “Kentucky in the New Republic: A Study of Distance and Connection,” in Friend, Buzzel about Kentuck, 103.
6. Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy (New York: Walker, 2002), 45.
7. Ellis, His Excellency George Washington, 10, 35.
8. Washington to George Mercer, Nov. 7, 1771, qtd. in Ellis, Washington, 57.
9. Linklater, Measuring America, 45.
10. Dorman, 14 n. 14.
11. Ibid., 14 n. 2.
12. Linklater, Measuring America, 33, 38.
13. Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 54 (Tuesday, Jan. 5, 1775).
14. Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 535, 538–39.
15. Ibid., 537, supplemented by the author’s correspondence with Hammon in 2006 about nine additional surveys, aggregating 15,237 acres, done by Boone in 1796 that Hammon found after the date of the article. Hammon and Harris estimated the time required for surveying, travel, and the number of trips required based on survey dates, locations, acreage surveyed, distance traveled, and number of assistants used. Their table did not include time and mileage required to register surveys. Hammon has advised the author that there may be other Boone surveys in Kentucky’s files because surveys are indexed by the recipients of the survey, not by the surveyor.
16. See Linklater, Measuring America, 15–18, for a description of chains and their use.
17. For summaries of the Boone surveys, see Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 560–66; Willard Rouse Jillson, “Land Surveys of Daniel Boone,” RKHS 44 (1946): 87–100.
18. JDS interview with William Risk, c. 1840s, DM 11CC87. According to Risk, it was also said that Boone, not being able to find a land entry he had made for someone, made a new entry and rubbed dirt over the new marks “so as to conceal the fraud”—but it was found out, which “caused him to leave the country for Missouri.” Another settler remembered that title under many of the surveys Boone undertook for others did not survive challenges in litigation: “Mighty little land ever held under Boon.” JDS interview with Maj. Jesse Daniel, c. 1843, DM 11CC93.
19. Willard Rouse Jillson, With Compass and Chain: A Brief Narration of the Activities of Col. Daniel Boone as a Land Surveyor in Kentucky (Frankfort: Roberts Printing Company, 1954), 8.
20. Draper’s interview with Nathan and Olive Boone, 1851, DM 6S221. For Nathan Boone’s career as a surveyor in Missouri, see R. Douglas Hurt, Nathan Boone and the American Frontier (Columbia: University of Missouri Press 1998), 111, 144–45 (surveying the boundary between the Creeks and the Cherokees).
21. Indeed, the Virginia land law contemplated that surveys should ordinarily “be bounded plainly by marked trees.” 1778 Virginia land law, app. 9. Hammon email to the author, Oct. 2007 (“precise in the direction and measurement of the sides”). The excerpt is from a reproduction of a Boone survey in Faragher, 174 f.
22. Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 539.
23. See generally Linklater, Measuring America.
24. Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 550–51; Faragher, 240–41.
25. Faragher, 241.
26. Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 552; Faragher, 241.
27. From tables of warrants purchased by Boone on Dec. 22, 1781, sent by Hammon to the author in Oct. 2007. The database at the office of the Kentucky Secretary of State for Virginia Treasury Warrants, http://apps.sos.ky.gov/land/nonmilitary/LandOfficeVTW, which lists these warrants, is not yet complete. By December 1781, the price for warrants had been increased to £1,600 per hundred acres. The inflation in Virginia’s currency after the Revolution was dramatic. In the last eight months of 1781 alone, the value of Virginia currency relative to specie dropped more than sixfold—from 150:1 in May to 1000:1 in December. Hening, Statutes of Virginia, 10:471–73.
28. MFDB, 110; DM 6S216.
29. Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 553–54, including on 554 a listing of all of Boone’s land claims.
30. MFDB, 110.
31. Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 555.
32. There were forty-eight deputy surveyors in Fayette County alone. Hammon to the author, Oct. 23, 2007.
33. Boone to Col. William Christian, Aug. 23, 1785, manuscript collection of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association, University of Missouri, printed in Lofaro, 135. A photocopy is in the manuscripts collection of the Filson Historical Society.
34. Faragher, 247, 399.
35. Imlay to Boone, Dec. 27, 1786, DM 26C152; Faragher, 246–47; MFDB, 109; Hammon to author, Oct. 2007 (Wilkinson’s claim against Boone). Imlay’s bond, dated Mar. 15, 1783, is in DM 25C83. For Imlay’s checkered career and double-dealing and his love affair with the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, see Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). For Imlay’s investment in the slave trade, see Wil Verho-even, “Gilbert Imlay and the Triangular Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (Oct. 2006): 827. Verhoeven has written a biography of Imlay, Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007).
36. Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America Containing a Succinct Account of its Soil, Climate, Natural History, Population, Agriculture, Manners and Customs with an Ample Description of the Several Divisions into Which that Country is Divided (London: J. Debrett, 1792).
37. David Todd to Mann Butler, Mar. 17, 1834, DM 15CC126.
38. MFDB, 109. The Draper manuscripts include notes of sheriff’s sales in Kentucky in Aug. and Sept. 1798 of three tracts of land owned by Boone, aggregating 10,500 acres. DM 15C51.
39. Baily, Journal of a Tour, 122–23.
40. Receipt of T. Perkins, Oct. 26, 1785, DM 26C69.
41. For summaries of this litigation, see Faragher, 242–45; and Morgan, 357–59. Faragher refers (p. 398) to a 1925 article in the Lexington Herald. According to Hammon, there is no record of Boone transferring any of his land to Hickman. Hammon to author, Feb. 24, 2008.
42. E.g., the ledger of John Brown, a prominent lawyer in Kentucky who was to become one of Kentucky’s first senators when Kentucky became a state, shows in Sept. 1786 a reference to what appears to be a payment by Boone of five pounds “to fee on Caot [?] v. Triplett.” Copy of ledger of John Brown, Liberty Hall Historic Site, Frankfort, Ky., 23. Brown’s ledger also show substantial fees due from Squire Boone and George Boone.
43. Hammon’s compilation of Boone’s depositions includes fifteen taken between 1785 and 1799 in what are now Kentucky and West Virginia. Hammon, ed., “Daniel Boone Papers,” MS, copy in the possession of the author, chap. 3.
44. Nathaniel Hart to Thomas Hart, Jan. 10, 1791, Manuscript Collection, FHS. The petition is in Fayette County Historical Records, 1:650-85, a transcript of which was sent by Hammon to the author. The Hart family, eventually represented by Henry Clay, brought suit against Boone and others to recover the land, but lost. The court declared there was no evidence to convict Boone of fraud. Estill v. Hart’s Heirs, Harding’s Reports, 1805-1808, Spring Term 1808, 567.
45. Faragher, 248–49; Bakeless, 340–46. The extent to which Boone was named as a party in suits is unclear. Faragher (p. 248) says Boone “was a party to at least ten lawsuits” from 1786 to 1789, but cites none. Hammon says that as far as he can discover, Boone “was never personally involved in any litigation.” Hammon to author, Feb. 24, 2008.
46. MFDB, 110.
47. Eslinger, Running Mad for Kentucky, 19.
48. Baily, Journal of a Tour, 87; Filson, 17.
49. In 1804 the somewhat snobbish young wife of Senator John Brown wrote to her husband that she had been to an “Assembly” at Frankfort, attended by, among other people, “Mr. Pearson (the tavern keeper)”: “This equality, my Love, is a mighty pretty thing upon paper, and a very useful one in the common intercourses of life, but does not suit a regular Assembly quite so well.” She added, “But I will say no more upon this subject; fortunately recollecting, that you once gave me a serious lecture, for some of my aristocratic notions.” Margaretta Brown to John Brown, Mar. 8, 1802, Brown Family Papers, FHS.
50. Dorman 4.
51. Bakeless, 332, 359 (citing examples of other licenses in Kentucky, in 1793, 1794, 1797, and 1799).
52. Boone to (by context) Patrick Henry, Aug. 16, 1785, DM 32C81A (a printed article containing what is said to be a copy of a letter “in the Executive Department of the State of Virginia”).
53. Draper interview with Joseph Scholl, 1868, DM 24S217.
54. For Boone’s ownership and purchase of slaves, see Bakeless, 329 and 329.1 and Faragher at 397. The letter relating to the sale, dated Mar. 3, 1791, and addressed to “William Haris,” DM 14C105[1], is printed in Bakeless, 329.
55. Historical Statistics, pt. 2, 1184 (74,604 pounds of ginseng were exported in 1770). As early as 1750, Col. William Johnson had been paying the Iroquois for ginseng, which he shipped to London, “and from there it is sent on to China where it is bought as the greatest rarity.” Daniel Claus to Conrad Weiser, Aug. 23, 1752, Peters MSS, 3: 61, Historical Society of Philadelphia, Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 338.
56. Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, The Empress of China (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Maritime Museum, 1984), 155, 206–7 (report in the New York Packet of the venture’s “very prosperous achievement” and of China’s appetite for ginseng), 312 n. 5 (listing of some of the American newspaper accounts of the ship’s return); David A. Taylor, Ginseng: The Divine Root (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2006), 89–99, 131–34.
57. Morgan, 366-67, believes Nathan was referring to tuns, although that term usually refers to casks containing liquids (e.g., wine).
58. MFDB, 81–82.
59. John F. Watson to Draper, Jan. 12, 1853, DM 1C19[2] (reminiscences of Rachael Lightfoot).
60. Journal of Joel Watkins, entries for May 16 and May 17, 1789, in Eslinger, Running Mad for Kentucky, 164–65.
61. Boone to Hart and Richardson, July 30, 1789, DM 14C92.
17. LIVING LEGEND, SHRINKING FORTUNE
1. Faragher, 5–6. For the spread of Filson’s Boone narrative in Europe, see also Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 314–20. For the dissemination of Filson’s narrative and its off-shoots in America, see 398–400.
2. Baily, Journal of a Tour, 115–17.
3. Ibid., 116.
4. Filson, 5–6.
5. Faragher, 2–3. According to John Walton, John Filson of Kentucke (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), 24–25, Filson on Dec. 19–20, 1782, claimed under treasury warrants three tracts of land containing 5,000, 4922, and 2446.5 acres. Walton cited register of Col. Thomas Marshall, surveyor of Fayette Country, bk. 3, 101, 102, 106.
6. Filson, 7, 21, 22, 25, 107–8.
7. Ibid., 81, 58.
8. John A. McClung, Sketches of Western Adventure (Maysville, Ky.: L. Collins, 1832), 79–80, qtd. in Faragher, 7. Richard Slotkin, who has focused on the myth of the frontier, sees Filson’s account as “a literary myth,” drawing strength in part from its basis in cultural mythology (e.g., how Americans were portraying Indians) and in “archetypal myth”—the hero descends into the world of darkness and death to seek a boon and returns with powers to sustain his people. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 278–310. While Filson’s telling of the Boone story may sometimes smack of myth (and contains overwriting to promote interest in the purchase of land in Kentucky), many of the facts and chronology in it jibe with other sources.
9. Undated, unsigned MSS in John Filson’s handwriting, DM 1MM60, qtd. in Watson, John Filson, 113; see Chinn, Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 588–89.
10. Watson, John Filson, 73 (Filson teaching school in Wilmington in 1785), 84, 91–92 (Filson’s note to John Brown and Brown’s attempts to be repaid), 98–100 (Filson’s prospectus for a seminary, from the Lexington Gazette of Jan. 19, 1787), 102 (doubtful the seminary ever was launched), 104–5 (Filson and Breckenridge as tenants in common enter one thousand acres in Powell’s Valley to include a silver mine), 106 (Filson’s letter to his brother Robert—“I resumed my Studies last winter and greatly advanced my latin, and this spring have begun to study Physic with Doctr Slater in this place, an eminent Physician who came here from London last year, two years I study, as soon as my Study is finished I am to be married”), 107–8 (poem written at Beargrass, June 30, 1788), 109–10, 112–20 (plans for Losantiville and probable killing by Indians); Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 207 (St. Clair names Cincinnati). For a short sketch of Filson, see J. Winston Coleman, “John Filson: Early Kentucky Historian,” Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 11, no. 1 (Jan. 1953): 58–65.
11. George P. Garrison, ed., “A Memorandum of M. Austin’s Journey from the County of Wythe in the State of Virginia to the Lead Mines in the Province of Louisiana West of the Mississippi, 1796–77, American Historical Review 5, no. 3 (1900): 525–26. Some discounting of Austin’s acerbic comments may be in order. He could be rude and disagreeable and, to one historian, “was hardly an unbiased, nor a particularly empathetic observer of western life.” Perkins, Border Life, 56.
12. Matthew Vanlear to Boone, Apr. 27, 1780, DM 27C6.
13. MFDB, 85.
14. Faragher, 265.
15. MFDB, 87; Lofaro, 143.
16. Faragher, 266; MFDB, 87–88, 93–95.
17. Boone to Governor Henry Lee, Dec. 13, 1791, DM 14C105. The letter is reprinted in Lofaro, 144.
18. Qtd. in W. S. Laidley, “Daniel Boone in the Kanawha Valley,” RKHS 2 (1913): 9–12.
19. Col. George Clendenin to Governor Henry Lee, Sept. 21, 1792, CVSP, 6:67.
20. Faragher, 269–70.
21. MFDB, 97.
22. Of the three youngest Boone children, Jesse had married a Van Bibber girl and set up house with her; Daniel Morgan was out by himself, hunting and looking for land; and young Nathan had been sent to Kentucky to stay with his married sisters Jemima and Susannah while he went to a school not far from Boone’s Station. MFDB, 97.
23. Draper interview with Edward Byram, Oct. 2, 1863, DM 19S170.
24. Draper interview with William Champ, 1863, DM 15C31–31[1].
25. Ralph Clayton to Draper, Apr. 10, 1883, DM 16C45.
26. Faragher, 270–71.
27. MFDB, 102.
28. MFDB, 98–99.
29. MFDB, 104; Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 566.
30. Isaac Shelby was listed as the marker on the two surveys, though this may have been because Shelby held the warrants for the tracts and acted as marker to familiarize himself with the tracts and to save money on the marker’s fees. Hammon and Harris, “Daniel Boone the Surveyor,” 543 n. 16.
31. Kincaid, Wilderness Road, 185.
32. Ibid., 191.
33. Garrison, “M. Austin’s Journey,” 525.
34. Kincaid, Wilderness Road, 202–3.
18. OUT TO MISSOURI
1. The 1795 census listed 2,665 people. Din and Nasatir, Imperial Osages, 243. William E. Foley, A History of Missouri, vol. 1: 1673–1820 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 46 (Upper Louisiana had scarcely 1,000 inhabitants when France assumed control of it in 1770), 50 (in 1804, when Spain transferred control of Upper Louisiana to the United States, the population of Upper Louisiana was estimated at 10,350, of which an estimated 15% were slaves). See also Jonas Viles, “Population and Extent of Settlement in Missouri before 1804,” Missouri Historical Review 5, no. 4 (July 1911): 189–213.
2. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 78–79.
3. Governor-General François Luis Hector Carondelet to Zenon Trudeau, Mar. 28, 1792, in Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of Missouri, 1785–1804, ed. Abraham P. Nasatir (St. Louis: St. Louis Historical Documents Foundation, 1952), 151.
4. Trudeau to Carondelet, Jan. 15, 1798, in Before Lewis and Clark, 542.
5. MFDB, 107–8.
6. The warrant, dated Nov. 29, 1798, and the endorsement are in Miscellaneous Papers, Manuscripts Department, FHS.
7. Squire Boone’s petition to Congress, undated (c. 1812?), Squire Boone Collection FHS.
8. Delinda Boone Bryan to Draper, Feb. 28, 1843, DM 22C6[2].
9. MFDB, 112.
10. MFDB, 108, 111–13; DM 6S221; Faragher, 274–79; Lofaro, 152.
11. Garrison, “M. Austin’s Journey,” 527 (Louisville), 535 (St. Louis). Austin may have been high in estimating St. Louis’s size. Trudeau, the Spanish commandant at St. Louis, said its population was 948. Trudeau to governor, St. Louis, Jan. 15, 1798, in Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, 536.
12. John M. Krum to Draper, Jan. 17, 1883, DM 16C54[1]
13. Trudeau to Governor-General Carondelet, Sept. 26, 1795, in Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, 350. But the land near St. Charles was rich. Timothy Flint, seeing it in 1816, told his companion, “Here shall be my farm, and here will I end my days!” According to Flint, “In effect, take it all and all, I have not seen, before nor since, a landscape which united, in an equal degree, the grand, the beautiful, and fertile.” Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 90–91.
14. DM 15C63, 15C66, 16C28, 6S225–36.
15. Faragher, 279.
16. Bakeless, 360; DM 16C4–5, 16C54(1–5). Flint’s early biographer Timothy Flint also gives the story of Boone’s “more elbow room!” explanation of the move to Missouri. Flint, Boone, 238.
17. Baily, Journal of a Tour, 116. The words Baily records as Boone’s sound suspiciously similar to Baily’s own Rousseau-influenced musings on the idyllic virtues of solitary life in the wilderness.
18. In 1800, a year after Boone moved to Missouri, Kentucky’s population was 221,000. Historical Statistics, pt. 1, 8 (total U.S. population), 33.
19. MFDB, 110.
20. Draper interview with Edward Coles, 1848, DM 310–11.
21. See Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind (1957; rpt., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 73 (“The real pioneers—Harrods, McAfees, Calloways, Boones, Bryans, Logans and Floyds—figured progressively less in the affairs of the region, gradually giving way before men of wealth and education such as the Browns, Todds, Bullitts, Breckenridges, McDowells, Harts, George Nichols, Harry Innes, Caleb Wallace, Thomas Marshall and James Wilkinson—many of whom had been leaders previously in southwestern Virginia”), 149–60. As Moore put it, “While conditions were heroic, the conceivers prudently stayed at home; when the Indians had been expelled and society stabilized, they asserted their claims and dispossessed the defenders of the forts” (159–60).
22. William Lytle to John Breckinridge, Jan. 10, 1797, vol./container 14, folio pp. 2421–22, Breckenridge Family Papers, Library of Congress (“rage among the poorer class”); Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 92.
23. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, Mar. 14, 1885, DM 21C24[10].
24. Gen. Thomas Gage to the earl of Shelburne, Feb. 22, 1767: “That Trade will go with the Stream is a Maxim found to be true, from all accounts that have been received of the Indian Trade carried on in the vast Tract of Country which lies on the Back of the British Colonies; and the Peltry acquired there, is carried to the Sea either by the River St. Lawrence or River Mississippi.” Mereness, 458–59.
25. Filson, 47.
26. John May to Samuel Beall, Apr. 15, 1780, Beall-Booth Family Papers, manuscript department, FHS.
27. Chinn, Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 372.
28. For summaries of Spain’s flirting with closing the Mississippi to Americans as a way to seek to induce the western American settlements to ally themselves with Spain, see Kluger, Seizing Destiny, 210–11; Foley, History of Missouri, 1:33–42; Chinn, Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 1750–1800, 464–69, 604–5; James Ripley Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior: Major-General James Wilkinson (New York: Macmillan, 1938). By 1794 Spain had sent some $32,000 to Wilkinson. While some was lost on the way, Wilkinson received some $26,000. Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior, 135. In 1788 John Brown, Kentucky’s representative to Congress, reported to a convention of Kentuckians considering applying for statehood that the Spanish minister to the United States, Diego de Gardoqui, had said he could grant to the westerners the use of the Mississippi—but under Spain’s commercial treaties with other nations, not so long as Kentucky is part of the United States. Talbert, Benjamin Logan, 232–36. See Bradford, Notes on Kentucky, 117, 302–18. The warnings of John Brown, George Nicholas, and John Breckenridge to James Madison about Kentucky’s unhappiness concerning loss of navigation on the Mississippi bore fruit. When John Brown returned to Kentucky from Congress in the spring of 1792, he carried letters from Madison and Jefferson to Harry Innes and George Nicholas announcing that foreign control of the Mississippi would no longer be tolerated. Marion Nelson Win-ship, “Kentucky in the New Republic: A Study of Distance and Connection,” in Friend, Buzzel about Kentuck, 109; Chinn, Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 461–62.
29. Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, “Political Condition of the Province of Louisiana,” July 5, 1792, J. A. Robertson, Louisiana under Spain, France, and the United States: 1785–1807 (Cleveland: A. H. Clark Co., 1911), 1:287.
30. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 289; Kluger, Seizing Destiny, 227–28 (Treaty of San Lorenzo), 267–68 (intendant’s closing of port facilities to Americans).
31. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Livingston, Apr. 18, 1802, qtd. in Aron, American Confluence, 107.
32. MFDB, 111; DM 6S221.
33. Peck, 122.
34. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, Apr. 2, 1791, qtd. in William E. Foley, The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 61.
35. Many other Americans moved into other Spanish-controlled territory near Missouri in the same period. On July 15, 1789, e.g., future U.S. president Andrew Jackson, then in his early twenties, took the oath of allegiance to the Spanish King Carlos III, in Natchez, Miss., then part of Spanish West Florida. Perhaps Jackson was thinking Natchez was far enough away from Tennessee (where he had been living) and Kentucky that he might live there in peace with Rachel Donelson Robards when he eloped with her, though she apparently was still then married to the Kentuckian Robards. Jackson moved back to Tennessee soon after he swore allegiance to the Spanish king. Ann Toplovich, “Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The Robards-Jackson Backcountry Scandal,” Ohio Valley History 5 (Winter 2005) 3–22.
36. Garrison, “M. Austin’s Journey,” 535, 540.
37. Ibid., 542.
38. Baily, Journal of a Tour, 137–38.
39. As the Spanish ambassador to the United States put it, “That colony cost us heavily and produced very little for us.” Marqués de Casa Yrujó to Pedro de Ceballos y Guerra, Aug. 3, 1803, in Robertson, Louisiana, 2:70.
40. Faragher, 275.
41. Talleyrand to Duc Denis Decrès, an xi, 4 Prairial (May 23, 1803), Robertson, Louisiana, 2:63.
42. Ellis, American Creation, 207–34.
43. Robertson, Louisiana, 2:342–43.
44. Faragher, 286.
45. DM 15C64. The description of Boone by Delassus is qtd. in a letter to Draper dated Apr. 17, 1885, from St. Louis by Frederick Billon.
46. Foley, History of Missouri, 1:70–71.
47. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806 (1904–5; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 1:24.
48. Gary Moulton, ed., The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2003), 3.
19. BOONE IN MISSOURI
1. Draper interview with Nathan and Olive Boone, 1851, DM 6S225.
2. Bakeless, Boone, 373; Faragher, 285. St. Charles was hardly a metropolis. A visitor in 1811, more than ten years after Boone arrived in Missouri, said St. Charles had three hundred inhabitants (largely French boatmen but with a considerable proportion of Americans), two or three stores, and “several genteel families.” Henry Marie Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River (1814; rpt., Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962), 128.
3. A copy of this document is DM 15C65. The document is printed in Bakeless, 373; and in Lofaro, 156.
4. For the killing of Hays, see Draper interview with Abner Bryan, 1890, DM 4C58; Faragher, 286–87; Lofaro, 156–57; Bakeless, 374–75.
5. Hurt, Nathan Boone and the American Frontier, 53.
6. William G. Beck, trans., “Gottfried Duden’s ‘Report,’ 1824–1827,” Missouri Historical Review 12 (1917–18): 262 (sixteenth letter, Dec. 10, 1825).
7. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C66.
8. MFDB, 119, 125; for Boone’s residing with Daniel Morgan, see a summary of Boone’s testimony in 1896 before the land commission, qtd. in Faragher, 281.
9. Dr. S. Paul Jones to Draper, May 13, 1887, DM 21C1[5–6].
10. Draper interview with Edward Coles, 1848, DM 6S311.
11. MFDB, 119.
12. MFDB, 120, DM 6S229.
13. Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1978), 1:200.
14. Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Enthnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press 1992), 215. Lieutenant Governor Trudeau in 1793 estimated that the main branch of the Osages numbered 1,250 men, young men, and warriors. Trudeau to Governor-General Carondelet, Apr. 10, 1793, in Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, 172. For a map of the Osage homelands, see Rollings, Osage, 68.
15. Kristie C. Wolferman, The Osage in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 12.
16. See generally Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
17. Carl H. Chapman, ed., “Louis Cartambert: Journey to the Land of the Osages, 1835–1836,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 19, no. 2 (Apr. 1963): 221.
18. MFDB, 120; DM 230; for the steel trap, see Faragher, 284–85; Bakeless, 365; and DM 6S231.
19. MFDB, 127.
20. MFDB, 122–24.
21. MFDB, 126–27; DM 6S244–46; Hurt, Nathan Boone, 47–50; Faragher, 290.
22. Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 146–47.
23. Aron, American Confluence, 150, quoting Rufus Babcock, ed., Forty Years of Pioneer Life: Memoir of John Mason Peck, D.D. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 146, 121.
24. Rollings, Osage, 11–13, 224–39, 240–42, 254–56.
25. Hurt, Nathan Boone, 52–77; Foley, History of Missouri, 130–32.
26. Zenon Trudeau to governor, St. Louis, Jan. 15, 1798, printed in Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, 534 (Carondelet appointed Lorimier commandant at Cape Girardeau); Pierre Chouteau to Wilkinson, St. Louis, Apr. 12, 1806, Missouri Historical Society, Pierre Chouteau letterbook, Nasatir, Before Lewis and Clark, 767 (as subagent at Cape Girardeau, Laurimier [sic] received four hundred dollars per year from the Spanish government); RUO, 114 n. 43; Aron, American Confluence, 80–82.
27. Stephen Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 17.
28. MFDB, 119; DM 6S228.
29. Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C66–67.
30. Hammon, MFDB, 119; DM 6S228; for the Shawnees’ visit, Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C66–67.
31. John C. Boone to Draper, Nov. 20, 1890, DM 16C132[2].
32. Rollings, Osage, 67, quoting Ora Brooks Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1822 (Denver: Sage Books, 1954), 14.
33. The board used its customary terse formulation: “It is the opinion of the Board, that this claim ought not to be confirmed.” For Boone’s argument in 1806 and for the decision of the commissioners, see American State Papers: Public Lands (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 2:736, available online at http://memory.loc/gov/ammem/amlaw/lwsplink.html#anchor8. See also Faragher, 291–94; Bakeless, 375–80. For the Delassus grants after 1800, see Aron, American Confluence, 111.
34. Bakeless, 378.
35. Boone to Judge Coburn, Oct. 5, 1809, manuscript collections of the KHS.
36. JDS interview with Daniel Boone Bryan, 1844, DM 22C14[14].
37. Faragher, 292–93; MFDB, 127 (my father “became ill and, fearing he might not recover, gave instructions to Hays and Derry to bury him between two certain trees near camp”).
38. Bakeless, 407.
39. Peck, 129.
40. Faragher, 287–88; Lofaro, 159.
41. MFDB, 47. Nathan Boone put Kenton’s visit in the spring of 1805 or 1806. Kenton’s children put the visit in 1809. Faragher, 294; Draper interview with John and Sarah Kenton McCord, 1851, DM 5S172; Draper interview with William M. Kenton, 1851, DM 5S125.
42. Stoner’s son George W. Stoner in 1868 told Draper they had gone “high up the Missouri.” DM 24C55[10–11]. Stephen Hempstead, a neighbor of Boone’s in St. Charles, told Draper in 1863 that he saw a boat coming down the Missouri River early in 1811, “with housing over the cargo, a sure sign of fur coming from the upper Missouri,” and that Boone was steering in the stern, with the boat holding a considerable value of furs. Hempstead to Draper, Mar. 6, 1863, DM 16C78[2]; Lofaro, 174 (quoting from the letter); Faragher, 295. Wade Hays, son of William Hays, Jr., on Jan. 18, 1889, recorded that “Daniel Boone & My Father and others Made a trip to the Yellow Stone on the hed waters of the Missouri River was in that country about two winters after Furrs.” MS 130, Wade Hays Family History, Seaver Center for Western History Research, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, qtd. in Lofaro, 171.
43. The letter from Fort Osage, qtd. in Bakeless, 391–92, was published in Niles’ Weekly Register, 10:261 [361], June 15, 1816. For the trip with Indian Philips upriver from Fort Leaven-worth, see MFDB, 136. See also Peck, 135.
44. Bakeless, 387; Lofaro, 166–67.
45. William S. Bryan and Robert Rose, A History of the Pioneer Families of Missouri (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1876) 103–4; Faragher, 303–4; Bakeless, Boone, 389.
46. MFDB, 135.
47. The Mountain Muse: Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone and the Power of Virtue and Refined Beauty (Harrisonburg, Va.: Davidson & Bourne, 1813), bk. 2, 52. As Arthur K. Moore put it, Bryan cast Boone “in a Miltonic setting—angels and devils and all—to amplify his matter and further to cloak conquest with divine sanction.” Moore, Frontier Mind, 164. The angels of the Lord sought, as their choice:
one, in whose expanded breast are found,
The great, ennobling virtues of the soul;
Benevolence, Mercy, Meekness, Pity, Love,
Benignant Justice, Valor lion-like,
And Fortitude, with stoic nerves endow’d.
(1:727–32)
48. Mountain Muse, bk. 2, 112. More of Bryan’s stanzas can be found in Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 348–51.
49. DM 7C43[1], qtd. in Lofaro, 167–68.
50. The progress of Boone’s petition and of the bill granting him land in Missouri can be tracked in American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States in Relation to the Public Lands, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1834), available online at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Web site, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlw/lwsplink.html#anchor8 (public lands, vol. 2). Boone’s petition and the favorable report of the Senate Committee, chaired by Senator Return Jonathan Meigs of Ohio, are at 2:5; the favorable report of the House Committee on the Public Lands in Dec. 1813 (appending a summary of Boone’s Feb. 1806 testimony before the board and the board’s decision of Dec. 1, 1809) is at 2:736; and a note of President Madison’s approval and signature of the bill is at 2:438. Several versions of Boone’s petition are cited in Faragher, 396. For the sale of the land and the application of proceeds to pay creditors, see DM 6S251; David Todd to Mann Butler, Mar. 17, 1834, DM 15CC126 (Boone told him he delivered his claim to the land to a Kentuckian, who pursued him on a loss of land in Kentucky, which Boone had warranted); MFDB, 116 (the petition was meant to be for a grant of ten thousand acres above the Boone Femme, “one of the finest tracts of land in Missouri”); and Bakeless, 382.
51. MFDB, 117.
20. LAST DAYS
1. MFDB, 135; DM 6S227.
2. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, May 24, 1885, DM 21C45[2–3].
3. Bakeless, 396–97. A leader of the German immigration to Missouri had read in Germany a similar story about Boone’s purported death. “Duden’s Report,” 262.
4. MFDB, 36–38.
5. Peck, 108.
6. Nathan Kouns to Draper, Jan. 16, 1863, DM 16C36.
7. David Todd to Mann Butler, Columbia, Mo., Mar. 17, 1834, DM 15CC126.
8. MFDB, 138.
9. Elizabeth Corbin to M. D. Lewis, St. LouisDaily Dispatch, Apr. 2, 1868, DM 16C97 (Boone had his coffin made to be the same as Rebecca’s); Draper interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866 DM 30C78 (Boone would get the coffin down and polish it); Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, May 29, 1885, DM 21C45[3] (made her mother [one of Boone’s granddaughters] shudder “to see him thump around his Coffin [and] whistle so happy and content”); A. J. Coshow, in the Republic, 1894 (Boone would lie in it to show how well it fit); Draper interview with Samuel Boone, 1868, DM 22S260 (Boone said he had taken “many a nice nap in his coffin”). For the use of the coffin Nathan had ordered, see MFDB, 138.
10. Houston was eighty-one when he told this story. Houston, 36.
11. F. W. Houston to Draper, Nov. 2, 1887, DM 20C:88–88(5), reprinted in Houston, 44–45.
12. MFDB, 111.
13. David Todd to Draper, Columbia, Mo., Mar. 17, 1834, DM 15CC126. See also Draper interview with Joseph McCormick, 1871, 30C111 (Boone in 1809 “said he had never returned from Kentucky to re-visit Kentucky”; he “said he had been treated badly in Kentucky—owned not a foot of its soil, after all his early discoveries, trials & dangers?”).
14. Maria R. Audubon, Audubon and His Journals (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1897; rpt., New York: Dover Publications 1994), 2:241, 506.
15. William Souder, Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of “The Birds of America” (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 11, 19, 222–24.
16. For Boone’s weight in his final years, see MFDB, 140.
17. Deposition of Boone, Sept. 22, 1817, St. Charles County, Missouri, DM 7C80-1; Deposition of Boone, Oct. 6, 1817, St. Charles County, Missouri, DM 7C105. See Hammon, ed. Daniel Boone Papers, chap. 3.
18. Peck, 7, 137.
19. Eviza L. Coshow to Draper, May 11, 1891, DM 21C70.
20. MFDB, 139.
21. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 172 (little interest in religion in Kentucky in the 1790s; quote from diary of David Barrow, MS in Western Kentucky University), 173 (estimate of number of church members in Kentucky), 173–88 (revivals, starting south of the Green River; impact of the New Madrid earthquakes). See also Tom Kanon, “‘Scared from Their Sins for a Season’: The Religious Ramifications of the New Madrid Earthquakes,” Ohio Valley History 5:2 (Summer 2005), 27 (memberships of the Methodist Western Conference jumped from 31,000 to close to 46,000 after the earthquakes).
22. Stephen Aron, American Confluence, 149–50.
23. Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 163.
24. MFDB, 17.
25. Flint, Boone, 249.
26. Peck, 138.
27. Faragher, 311, The question of whether Boone had ever experienced a change in his feelings toward Jesus was by Rev. James E. Welch, recounted in the Louisville Christian Repository, Mar. 1860, DM 16C47.
28. Boone to Sarah Day Boone, Oct. 17, 1816, DM 27C88–88[1]. Transcriptions of the letter appear in Faragher, 312; and Lofaro, 173.
29. A later document signed by Daniel Boone, in context dating from 1818, is a petition to the Hon. B. N. Tucker recommending Absolem Hays as constable for the Femme Osage Township. Over thirty people signed the petition. Boone’s signature follows that of his son-in-law Flanders Callaway. More than twice as many—including Boone’s son Daniel Morgan Boone—signed a petition recommending the appointment of a contender for the post named Sumner Bacon. Both petitions are in the archives of the St. Charles County Historical Society, St. Charles, Mo.
30. Aron, American Confluence, 158–64, 213–15.
31. Ibid., 178–84; Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, Apr. 22, 1820.
32. William S. Bryan and Robert Rose, A History of the Pioneer Families of Missouri (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1876), 2–3.
33. Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods, 14–17. In the summer of 1820 Harding produced at least two finished portraits from the oil sketch and from a now-lost pencil sketch—a half-length portrait, in which Boone wears a brown coat with a dark fur collar, and a full-length portrait, painted on a table oilcloth. The full-length portrait was damaged, though Harding was able to salvage the head. An 1820 engraving by James Otto Lewis, now in the St. Louis Art Museum, shows what Harding’s full-length picture would have looked like (Sweeney, Colum-bus of the Woods, fig. 7). See Peck, 139; and DM 6S277–78, for the need to steady the feeble Boone as he sat for the sketch.
34. MFDB, 139.
35. Excerpts from Harding’s account of painting Boone’s portrait, in Harding, My Ego-tistigraphy, 35–36, are printed in Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods, 14–15; Bakeless, 413; and Lofaro, 175–76. For accounts of Boone’s death, see MFDB, 138–39; Draper’s interview with Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C79–83; Faragher, 317–19; Lofaro, 176–77; Bakeless, 412–13. Nathan Boone says that because there were very few Masons in the region, there were no Masonic honors (139), though Boone was a member. Morgan speculates that Freemasonry may have been significant in Boone’s life. The paucity of references to Boone as a mason makes this claim unlikely.
36. Peck, 139–40.
21. LIFE AFTER DEATH
1. MFDB, 126.
2. For overviews of differing views of Boone after his death, see Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, esp. 268–516; Moore, Frontier Mind, 139–48, 164–88, 199–203; Richard Taylor, “Daniel Boone as American Icon: A Literary View,” RKHS 102 (2004): 513; Faragher, 320–62; Lofaro, 180–83. Moore found it “indicative of nineteenth-century thinking that Boone should have been installed in two different myths—progressivism and primitivism—which, though not in all respects antithetical, clash on several levels and ultimately point in opposite directions.” Frontier Mind, 188. For different treatments of Boone in paintings and sculpture, see Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods.
3. Byron to Thomas Moore, Sept. 19, 1818, in Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 180.
4. Benita Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Flame (New York: Knopf, 1999), 611.
5. Byron to John Murray, Aug. 12, 1819, Marchand, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, 213.
6. Don Juan, ix, xli.
7. See E. D. Hirsch, “Byron and the Terrestrial Paradise,” in Byron’s Poetry, ed. Frank McConnell (New York: Norton, 1978), 448.
8. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 116–18.
9. For the Shelley–Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin–Claire Clairmont ménage, see, e.g., Eisler, Byron, 504, 514–31, 553; Phyllis Grosskurth, Byron: The Flawed Angel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 265, 276–78, 287, 294, 304, 309, 312, 396, 409–10, 469.
10. The relationship was complex enough that the poet Robert Southey accused Byron and Shelley of forming a “League of Incest.” Byron denied this, pointing out that Mary Godwin and Clair Clermont were not sisters, Mary being Godwin’s daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft and Claire being the daughter of a subsequent wife of Godwin by a former husband. Byron also denied there was “promiscuous intercourse” within the group—“my commerce being limited to the carnal knowledge of the Miss C[lairmont]—I had nothing to do with the off-spring of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Byron to John Cam Hobhouse, Nov. 11, 1818, in Marchand, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, 182–83.
11. See Cooper’s 1851 introduction to The Prairie (New York: Signet/New American Library, 1964), vii; Prairie, n. 3 and accompanying text.
12. James Hall, Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the West (Cincinnati: Hubbard and Edmands, 1834), qtd. in Faragher, 323.
13. Flint, Boone, 21, 27–29, 50, 68–71, 75, 87, 113, 123, 143, 190.
14. Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 119, 116, 102.
15. Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods, 25.
16. Horatio Greenough to Sen. James Pearce, Mar. 14, 1859, qtd. in Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods, 27. The statue was finally removed from the steps of the Capitol after World War II. Faragher, 337.
17. Slotkin, reviewing different American tellings of the Boone story before 1860, suggests that writers from different regions put their own regional slant on the story: westerners emphasized Boone’s powers as a man; easterners tended to view him as uncouth (a white Indian) or decked him in social graces; southern writers made him out to be either a disguised aristocrat or a subordinate to a more aristocratic hero. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 394–465.
18. Flint, Boone, 8, 250.
19. The quote is from Judge John Coburn’s eulogy of Boone in 1820, DM 16C85.
20. John L. Sullivan, “The True Title,” Dec. 27, 1845. See William Gilpin in 1860: “The un-transacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent.… Divine task! Immortal mission! Let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us! Let every American heart open wide for patriotism to grow undiminished, and confide with religious faith in the sublime and prodigious destiny of his well-loved country.” The Mission of the North American People: Geographical, Social, and Political, 2nd ed. (1860; rpt., Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1873), 124.
21. Peck, title page, 137, 7.
22. The critic Henry T. Tuckerman in 1852, in Western Pioneer, writing about a painting in which Boone points out to his companions the fertile levels of Kentucky, said the picture proclaimed Boone as “the hunter and pioneer, the Columbus of the woods, the forest philosopher and brave champion.” See Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods, epigraph and 37.
23. Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods, 41. The Bingham picture is at Washington University in St. Louis. A theme similar to Bingham’s underlies William T. Ranney’s Daniel Boone’s First View of Kentucky (1849), reproduced as color pl. 3 of Sweeney, Columbus of the Woods.
24. Draper to Orlando Brown, May 13, 1854, Orlando Brown papers, FHS (asking Brown to solicit the insertion in two newspapers of his Boone project).
25. For Draper’s life and work, including the Boone biography, see Draper, 5–16; Faragher, 342–46; William B. Hesseltine, Pioneer’s Mission: The Story of Lyman Copeland Draper (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1954); Reuben Gold Thwaites, “Lyman Copeland Draper: A Memoir,” in Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 1 (1903): ix–xxvi.
26. For a summary of the dime novels, the movies, the TV series, the novels, and the poems about Boone, see Faragher, 338–42.
27. Note by Belue, Draper, 94 n. 99.
28. Dorman, 152.
29. “Daniel Boone and the Frankfort Cemetery,” RKHS 50 (1952): 207.
30. JDS interview with Jacob Swigert, 1846, DM 11CC289.
31. For a description of the negotiations and the exhumation, see “Daniel Boone and the Frankfort Cemetery,” 208–21; Faragher, 356–58.
32. John Mason Brown to Lyman C. Draper, Oct. 4, 1882, DM 16C82.
33. For accounts of the procession and ceremony, see “Burial of Daniel Boone,” Frankfort Commonwealth, Sept. 16, 1845; J. W. Venable, “The Burial of Daniel Boone,” May 5, 1855, autograph file 5, Houghton Library, Harvard; Faragher, 358–59; “Daniel Boone and the Frankfort Cemetery,” 200–236; and Michael A. Lofaro, “The Many Lives of Daniel Boone,” RKHS 102 (1952): 489, 508–9 (the Procession Order is also printed at “Daniel Boone and the Frankfort Cemetery,” 225–26).
34. John G. Tompkins, “phrenological developments of daniel boone,” Frankfort Commonwealth, Feb. 9, 1846, reprinted in RKHS 50 (July 1952): 231–32. The article indicates that the man who took a cast of the skull was John G. Tompkins—not, as John Mason Brown remembered in 1882, someone named Davis. In 1907 the grandson of Rev. Philip Slater Fall said his grandfather made the cast of the skull and presented it to the society. “Daniel Boone and the Frankfort Cemetery,” 223.
35. Frankfort State Journal, June 24, 1983; clipping in Boone Biographical File, KHS; National Geographic, Dec. 1985. For the competing claims of Missouri and Kentucky, see Faragher, 361–62.
36. Cincinnati Enquirer, Aug. 13, 2004, www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/08/13/loc_kyold remains13.html.
37. Louisville Courier-Journal, Mar. 5, 1995. Craig has described her work as a forensic anthropologist, without mentioning Boone’s skull but noting that Kentucky needed a full-time forensic anthropologist because of its “history of violent crime and ‘mountain justice’ dating even back before the notorious feuds of the Hatfields and the McCoys”—a “culture of lawlessness” that “has only gotten worse with the rise of illegal drug use and marijuana’s dubious honor as one of the Commonwealth’s most lucrative cash crops.” Emily Craig, Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America’s Most Infamous Crime Scenes (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004).
38. Perhaps both Kentucky and Missouri have some of Boone’s bones. Ken Kamper, historian for the Boone Society, Inc., has sensibly suggested to the author that in 1845 the exhumers from Kentucky could well have dug out and removed the larger bones of Daniel and Rebecca Boone, but the coffins were rotted away and many of the smaller bones, being harder to spot and less well preserved, would likely have been left behind in the Missouri burying ground.
1. Boone to Sarah Day Boone, Oct. 19, 1816, DM 27C88. Transcriptions of the letter appear in Faragher, 312; and Lofaro, 173.
2. JDS interview with Josiah Collins, 1840s, DM 12CC97.
3. David Todd to Mann Butler, Columbia, Mo., Mar. 17, 1834, DM 15CC126.
4. Historical Statistics, pt. 2, chap. Z, 1168 (1,170,760).
5. Ibid., pt. 1, 8 (3,929,214 in 1790; 9,638,453 in 1820).The shift of America’s population to the west (and generally to the south) has continued ever since Boone’s time. Not until 1980 did the center of the country’s population cross the Mississippi into Missouri, more than 180 years after Boone had done so. In 2000 the Census Bureau calculated the population center of the country to be in Edgar Springs, in south-central Missouri—less than a hundred miles from where Boone died. After 180 years the country’s center had finally caught up with Daniel Boone and his family. For a map showing how the United States population center has migrated steadily south-and westward, see “America Then and Now,” supplement to National Geographic, June 2005.
6. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ed. Harold P. Simonson (1893; rpt., New York: Ungar, 1963), 31.
7. Aron, American Confluence, 165.
8. Turner, Significance of the Frontier, 35.
9. Draper, 456 n. a.
10. Col. Charles A. Marshall to Draper, Nov. 21, 1884, DM 10BB48(8)–48(15).
11. Ranck, 133–36.
12. Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 273.
13. Stephen Aron, “‘The Poor Men to Starve’: The Lives and Times of Workmen in Early Lexington,” in Friend, Buzzel about Kentuck, 177–78, 183–84. Lexington’s economy was soon to take heavy hits from cheaper British products, the western financial panic, and the shifting of regional trade to Cincinnati and Louisville as steamboats proliferated on the Ohio and Mississippi (181–82).
14. Niles’ Weekly Register, June 11, 1814; Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 238.
15. Margaretta Brown to John Brown, Mar. 8, 1802, Brown Family Papers, FHS, described a “tolerably agreeable” assembly she had attended in Frankfort.
16. Margaretta Brown to Eliza S. Quincy, Dec. 22, 1804, in Memoir of the Life of Eliza S. M. Quincy, ed. E. S. Quincy (Boston: J. Wilson and Son, 1861), 97. Apart from a few cabins, houses at Frankfort were not built until after James Wilkinson bought much of the town site in 1786.
17. Margaretta Brown to John Brown, New York, Jan. 31, 1811, Brown Family Papers, FHS.
18. Margaretta Brown to Orlando Brown, July 7, 1819, Brown Family Papers, FHS.
19. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 133.
20. Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 49, 51.
21. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 90–91.
22. Aron, American Confluence, 174, 198.
23. Peck, 137.