and greed, its pride and its independence, was about to begin spreading rapidly from ocean to ocean.
Daniel Boone, Jed Smith, and the Mountain Men
Go play with the towns you have built of blocks,
The towns where you would have bound mel
I sleep in my earth like a tired fox,
And my buffalo have found me.
—STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT “The Ballad of William Sycamore” (1790-1871)
“It was on the first of May, in the year 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time, and left my family and peaceable habitation on the Yadkin River, in North Carolina, to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucke. . . .” So ran the words of Daniel Boone’s autobiography—and so another chapter in American frontiering began. A tall man with whipcord muscles beneath the buckskin, Boone moved silently through the forest with the soft stride of an Indian. He carried a slim, long-barreled American rifle and it was plain by the way he handled it that it was an extension of his eyes and hands. His animal instincts were honed fine, and in the woods he was sure-footed, with the tireless gait of a man who could lope most of the day if there was good reason—as there sometimes was.
His tradition was older than that of Jefferson’s farmers, for he was the essential outrider of settlement. Frontiersmen before him, in quest of their own “Kentuckes,” had already traversed more than a third of the continent. Their first great captain, Samuel de Champlain, founded Quebec before Plymouth Rock, and by 1750 his intrepid successors—Joliet, La Salle, Verendrye, and the voyageurs—had paddled and portaged across a great Y extending from Quebec to Lake Winnipeg down to the mouth of the Mississippi. These French and English trapper-explorers were not searching for gold, or for land to farm. Some sought the Northwest Passage; others were after the only treasure their canoes could carry—the finest furs in the world.
Daniel Boone was not a discoverer, in the strict sense. Trappers and Indian traders had penetrated the dark hills before his time, and nearly eighty years earlier La Salle’s courtier de bois, the peerless Couture, traveled from the Mississippi up the Tennessee River and over the crests to Charles Town on the Atlantic Coast. The trail-opening work of Boone and other hunters in the 1770’s struck an auspicious note in our history because it coincided with the events of the Revolution.
The sixth son of a Quaker blacksmith, he was bom in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1734, nine years before Jefferson. His father later took up a farm in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, and here, on the far edge of settlement, Daniel learned the survival code of the frontier and acquired from friendly Cherokees a forest prowess that made him at home in wild country the rest of his fife.
While still a young man Daniel went off to war as a wagoner in Braddock’s campaign against the French and Indians, and on returning, he married and carved out a farm of his own, but the urge to have a long look at the undiscovered country got the best of him.
The truth was that Daniel preferred the rifle to the plow, and although word was about that a British Proclamation forbade expansion, the King’s rules didn’t run in the upcountry, and young men with Indian instincts were bound to crave a westward look.
There was the lure of adventure and the chance to test one’s backwoods skills, but there was more than that. At this point in our history, the meaning of the wilderness began to change: the best of the backwoodsmen had mastered Indian woodcraft, and as venturesome hopes dissolved some of the old fears, a new mystique gripped men who lived at the fringe of the frontier. Jefferson sensed it later, and wagered the price of Louisiana on the destiny it held for the American people. It was a mystique known only to men confronted with a virgin continent or an uncharted sea: the undaunted curiosity and quiet fury that led earlier men—Marco Polo, Columbus, Balboa—to take the final chance in their search for the edges of the unknown.
Despite all hazards, men would cross the next river and push through the next gap because certain desires could not be quenched. And so, while young Jefferson formed new ideas about government and the rights of farmers, Daniel Boone left his plow in a half-finished furrow and went into the woods to rediscover an old way of life. Its pleasures were not so cozy as the ones back home, but there were deer and buffalo to kill, and bear to try himself against. There was the dark forest to explore, a game of hide-and-seek with the Shawnees to give a tang to it all, and always the compelling questions: Where does that ridge lead? What lies over the blue hills beyond?
There have been Americans who have had a sixth sense for geography, a map in their heads, and a compass and sextant in their innards. Daniel Boone was one of them, and in 1769 his compass pointed toward Kentucke. He must have fallen in love with the country there, for he wintered over twice and did not return to his family for two years. By the time he came out, he knew more about the bluegrass country than any other white man.
It is hard for us to recreate accurately the life and times of Daniel Boone or to know the Kentucke of his first years. Writing was a skill he lacked, and the autobiography John Filson ghosted for him is two parts Paul Bunyan and one part truth. There were other woodsmen whose achievements at least matched Daniel’s—trail blazers like Ben Logan, Colonel James Knox, Simon Kenton, and Michael Stoner—but, thanks mainly to Filson, it was Boone who became the symbol of them all. The book provides more insight into the folk beliefs of the time than into the state of mind of the real Daniel Boone. Filson’s Kentucke was a halfway house between the Garden of Eden and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The soil was richer, the climate was “more temperate and healthy than other settled parts of America”; there were no marshes or swamps; wild game abounded; livestock could roam untended—and manna from heaven could be had for the asking. Filson’s tales of Boone, like the legend of Paul Bunyan, helped fill his fellow Americans with optimism that made a paradise of any land to the West.
After we won our independence, the making of land-myths became a national pastime. The myth-makers infected our politics and produced the Go West and Manifest Destiny movements. As long as men were convinced that our continent was a succession of pastures of plenty, they would attempt great and foolhardy deeds, and their forward thrust would ultimately move beyond Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.
Filson’s Kentucke was, in reality, a moving magnet—a neck of the woods that moved a little farther west each year, always one step ahead of settlement. We will never know precisely what Boone saw when he peered down into the valleys of Kentucke from his lookout on top of Big Hill, but we know full well that the Filson-Boone autobiography is one of the early manifestations of the Myth of Superabundance that later caused us to squander our natural resources.
About the time Daniel had his first big look, decisions about the future of Kentucke were being made, and the fever of land speculation involved him in the Transylvania Land Company’s scheme to circumvent the King’s Proclamation, preempt an enormous area beyond the mountains, and plant a new colony in the wilderness.
It was early in the spring when Boone set out with a party of twenty-nine along the wilderness road through the Cumberland Gap. Four weeks later, on the twentieth of April, 1775, the first pack train arrived at the site of Boonesborough. This, unknown to the Kentucke colonists, was a moment of national climax, for just twenty-four hours earlier there had been a beginning of another sort on the village green in Lexington, Massachusetts, where a small band of “embattled farmers” put their future in the hands of the minutemen.
Boone,
