Volume I Part 10 (2/2)

In this same year many different bodies of hunters and surveyors came into the country, drifting down the Ohio in pirogues. Some forty men led by Harrod and Sowdowsky[50] founded Harrodsburg, where they built cabins and sowed corn; but the Indians killed one of their number, and the rest dispersed. Some returned across the mountains; but Sowdowsky and another went through the woods to the c.u.mberland River, where they built a canoe, paddled down the muddy Mississippi between unending reaches of lonely marsh and forest, and from New Orleans took s.h.i.+p to Virginia.

At that time, among other parties of surveyors there was one which had been sent by Lord Dunmore to the Falls of the Ohio. When the war broke out between the Shawnees and the Virginians, Lord Dunmore, being very anxious for the fate of these surveyors, sent Boon and Stoner to pilot them in; which the two bush veterans accordingly did, making the round trip of 800 miles in 64 days. The outbreak of the Indian war caused all the hunters and surveyors to leave Kentucky; and at the end of 1774 there were no whites left, either there or in what is now middle Tennessee. But on the frontier all men's eyes were turned towards these new and fertile regions. The pioneer work of the hunter was over, and that of the axe-bearing settler was about to begin.

1. This is true as a whole; but along the Mississippi, in the extreme west of the present Kentucky and Tennessee, the Chickasaws held possession. There was a Shawnee town south of the Ohio, and Cherokee villages in southeastern Tennessee.

2. The backwoodsmen generally used ”trace,” where western frontiersmen would now say ”trail.”

3. Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia. He named them after the Duke of c.u.mberland. Walker was a genuine explorer and surveyor, a man of mark as a pioneer. The journal of his trip across the c.u.mberland to the headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750 has been preserved, and has just been published by William Cabell Rives (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.). It is very interesting, and Mr. Rives has done a real service in publis.h.i.+ng it. Walker and five companions were absent six months. He found traces of earlier wanderers--probably hunters. One of his companions was bitten by a bear; three of the dogs were wounded by bears, and one killed by an elk; the horses were frequently bitten by rattlesnakes; once a bull-buffalo threatened the whole party. They killed 13 buffaloes, 8 elks, 53 bears, 20 deer, 150 turkeys and some other game.

4. Hunters and Indian traders visited portions of Kentucky and Tennessee years before the country became generally known even on the border. (Not to speak of the French, who had long known something of the country where they had even made trading posts and built furnaces, as see Haywood, etc.) We know the names of a few. Those who went down the Ohio, merely landing on the Kentucky sh.o.r.e, do not deserve mention; the French had done as much for a century. Whites who had been captured by the Indians, were sometimes taken through Tennessee or Kentucky, as John Salling in 1730 and Mrs. Mary Inglis in 1756 (see ”Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” Collis, etc.). In 1654 a certain Colonel Wood was in Kentucky. The next real explorer was nearly a century later, though Doherty in 1690, and Adair in 1730, traded with the Cherokees in what is now Tennessee. Walker struck the head-water of the Kentucky in 1750; he had been to the c.u.mberland in 1748. He made other exploring trips.

Christopher Gist went up the Kentucky in 1751. In 1756 and 1758 Forts Loudon and Chisset were built on the Tennessee head-waters, but were soon afterwards destroyed by the Cherokees. In 1761, '62, '63 and for a year or two afterwards a party of hunters under the lead of one Wallen hunted on the western waters, going continually farther west. In 1765 Croghan made a sketch of the Ohio River. In 1766 James Smith and others explored Tennessee. Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay, and a party from South Carolina were near the present site of Nashville in 1767, in the same year John Finley and others were in Kentucky, and it was Finley who first told Boon about it and led him thither.

5. The attempt to find out the names of the men who first saw the different portions of the western country is not very profitable. The first visitors were hunters, simply wandering in search of game, not with any settled purpose of exploration. Who the individual first-comers were, has generally been forgotten. At the most it is only possible to find out the name of some one of several who went to a given locality.

The hunters were wandering everywhere. By chance some went to places we now consider important. By chance the names of a few of these have been preserved. But the credit belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to the individual backwoodsman.

6. August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boon).

His grandfather was an English immigrant; his father had married a Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country was still a wilderness. He was born in Berks Co.

7. The inscription is first mentioned by Ramsey, p. 67. See Appendix C, for a letter from the Hon. John Allison, at present (1888) Secretary of State for Tennessee, which goes to prove that the inscription has been on the tree as long as the district has been settled. Of course it cannot be proved that the inscription is by Boon; but there is much reason for supposing that such is the case, and little for doubting it.

8. He was by birth a Virginian, of mixed Scotch and Welsh descent. See Collins, II., 336; also Ramsey. For Boon's early connection with Henderson, in 1764, see Haywood, 35.

9. Even among his foes; he is almost the only American praised by Lt.-Gov. Henry Hamilton of Detroit, for instance (see _Royal Gazette_, July 15, 1780).

10. John Finley.

11. ”The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter”; nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,--a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable ”Life” in the Filson Club Publications.

12. The Nieblung Lied tells of Siegfried's feats with bear, buffalo, elk, wolf, and deer:

”Danach schlug er wieder einen Buffel und einen Elk Vier starkes Auer nieder und einen grimmen Schelk, So schnell trug ihn die Mahre, dasz ihm nichts entsprang; Hinden und Hirsche wurden viele sein Fang.

....... ein Waldthier furchterlich, Einen wilden Baren.”

Siegfried's elk was our moose; and like the American frontiersmen of to-day, the old German singer calls the Wisent or Bison a buffalo--European sportsmen now committing an equally bad blunder by giving it the name of the extinct aurochs. Be it observed also that the hard fighting, hard drinking, boastful hero of Nieblung fame used a ”spur hund,” just as his representative of Kentucky or Tennessee used a track hound a thousand years later.

13. His name was John Stewart.

14. His remaining absolutely alone in the wilderness for such a length of time is often spoken of with wonder; but here again Boon stands merely as the backwoods type, not as an exception. To this day many hunters in the Rockies do the same. In 1880, two men whom I knew wintered to the west of the Bighorns, 150 miles from any human beings.

They had salt and flour, however; but they were nine months without seeing a white face. They killed elk, buffalo, and a moose; and had a narrow escape from a small Indian war party. Last winter (1887-88) an old trapper, a friend of mine in the days when he hunted buffalo, spent five months entirely alone in the mountains north of the Flathead country.

15. Deposition of Daniel Boon, September 15, 1796. Certified copy from Deposition Book No. I, page 156, Clarke County Court, Ky. First published by Col. John Mason Brown, in ”Battle of the Blue Licks,” p. 40 (Frankfort, 1882). The book which these old hunters read around their camp-fire in the Indian-haunted primaeval forest a century and a quarter ago has by great good-luck been preserved, and is in Col. Durrett's library at Louisville. It is ent.i.tled the ”Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, London, MDCCLXV,” and is in two small volumes. On the t.i.tle-page is written ”A. Neelly, 1770”

Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as any other cla.s.s of people. In the long winter evenings they study to good purpose books as varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow, Parton's ”Life of Jackson,” and the Rollo stories--to mention only volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cowboys and hunters.

16. MS. diary of Benj. Hawkins, 1796. Preserved in Nash. Historical Soc.

In 1796 buffalo were scarce; but some fresh signs of them were still seen at licks.

17. Haywood, p. 75, etc. It is a waste of time to quarrel over who first discovered a particular tract of this wilderness. A great many hunters traversed different parts at different times, from 1760 on, each practically exploring on his own account. We do not know the names of most of them; those we do know are only worth preserving in county histories and the like; the credit belongs to the race, not the individual.

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