of progress and a promoter of towns, but this was an episode he would regret. As a result of his service to the Transylvania Company, he eventually acquired claims on 100,000 acres of choice land. Although he lost much of this land when the Transylvania Company collapsed during the Revolution, he temporarily prospered. But Boone was never at home in a world of fences and farms and legal documents, and as a landlord and land speculator he had a bungling way of letting property slip through his hands.
In 1799, Old Daniel called it quits and headed downriver to accept a Missouri land grant tendered the famous Colonel Boone by the Spanish governor. But fate and his own incompetence in the land business stripped the old man even of this grant. Years later the discouraging story was repeated for the last time when Congress awarded him 850 acres for his “arduous and useful services” to his country. Boone sold this land to pay his Kentucke creditors, and he died in 1820, at eighty-five, a landless freeman still in love with the open country.
Filson made him a rustic George Washington, and put a politician’s words in his mouth: Boone considered himself “an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness” and “all his toils and dangers” were made worth while by the prospect of Kentucke becoming “one of the most opulent and powerful states on the continent of North America.”
It is far more likely, however, that another utterance of the old man (recalled years later by a grandson) reveals for us the real Daniel Boone: “I had much rather possess a good fowling piece, with two faithful dogs, and traverse the wilderness with one or two friendly Indian companions, in quest of a hoard of buffaloes or deer, than to possess the best township or to fill the first executive office of the state.”
Boone the town man was a failure. Boone the folk hero existed only in fiction. It was Boone the outdoorsman who left us a lasting legacy. Land-planning eluded him, but Daniel Boone seemed to hold the notion that every man should have a chance to own a piece of property—to farm, to develop, to use. Implicit in his way of life also was the idea that part of the land should be unowned, or rather publicly owned, as a permanent “hunting ground” for all who like the out-of-doors. His idea of happiness included unspoiled country where the land could sing its authentic songs, and where men could hear the call of wild things and know the precious freedom of the wilderness. By the time Boone died, however, his countrymen were already preparing to dismember the wilderness, and to the east both state and federal governments were disposing of their public lands so rapidly that too little land would be preserved where the young men of the future could relive the adventures of Daniel Boone or know the challenge of wide-open spaces.
Others along the wide Missouri and down the Mississippi knew what Boone meant. One, Mark Twain, would later write a nostalgic story of our early Eden. Huck Finn is a portrait of the American close to the frontier and the wilderness—careless, free of restraints, with none of the unimportant virtues and all of the essential ones. He does not plow or plant or build; he accepts his world with an Indian’s casualness and with now and then an Indian’s respect. When, at the end, he has a choice of alternatives—to be “civilized” and learn to live up to his newly discovered moral sense, or to stay with nature and to head for the Territories—he picks the latter as the better choice.
The trail of the White Indians did not end with Daniel Boone’s burial beside the Missouri. Just a few miles upriver a ten-year-old named Christopher Carson was doing his farm chores and longing to strike out across the plains. In a blacksmith shop in St. Louis an illiterate adolescent named Jim Bridger was sweating over the red-hot iron and wondering about the high country. In some unknown stretch of forest an educated young man with a Bible in his pack was already moving inevitably toward that day, a year and a half later, which would determine the course of his short life and influence his country’s future. The day was March 20, 1822, when Jedediah Strong Smith, aged twenty-two, read this notice in a St. Louis newspaper:
To enterprising young men. The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.
The man who placed this famous want ad was William H. Ashley, the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri. Within a week he had his takers, and preparations that would revolutionize the fur trade moved forward. The toughest of his recruits would tackle the Indians and the elements, become the most competent outdoorsmen in our history, and write the boldest chapter in the winning of the West.
The magnet that drew the expedition west was beaver, and Ashley’s motley band shared a spirit of adventure as expectant and strong-nerved as that which had carried sea-going men around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic centuries earlier. They had Boone’s bent, but the risks they ran were greater and only the lucky ones would live long enough to be town men. Equipped only with horses and rifles and traps, they headed toward the high mountain streams of the Rockies a thousand miles away.
There was a St. Louis saying that God always stayed on his own side of the Missouri, but raw nerve was the long suit of these “enterprising young men,” and Bernard De Voto has given us a superb description of the Spartan demands of this frontier:
The frontiersman’s craft reached its maximum and a new loneliness was added to the American soul. The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains. This was the arid country, the land of little rain; the Americans had not known drouth. It was the dead country; they had known only fecundity. It was the open country; they had moved through the forests, past the oak openings to the high prairie grass. It was the country of intense sun; they had always had shade to hide in. The wilderness they had crossed had been a passive wilderness, its ferocity without passion and only loosed when one blundered; but this was an aggressive wilderness, its ferocity came out to meet you and the conditions of survival required a whole new technique. . . . In that earlier wilderness, a week’s travel, or two weeks’ travel, would always bring you to where this year’s huts were going up, but in the new country a white man’s face was three months travel, or six months’, or a year away. Finally this was the country of the Plains Indians, horse Indians, nomads, buffalo hunters, the most skillful, the most relentless, and the most savage on the continent. . . . Mountain craft was a technological adaptation to these hazards.
The decade of the 1820’s was the golden era of the fur trade and gave birth to the free-trapper tradition. Out of that era have come as many legends as facts, and the legend-makers have bequeathed us, larger than life, a Kit Carson and a Jim Bridger. But most of the mountain men never reached the glory road of Western fiction: they did not find their Filson, or they ventured too much, or their luck ran out. This is not their story, but we owe it to them in passing to recite names like Tom Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, Antoine Leroux, “Black” Harris, the Bent brothers, Manuel Lisa, and Etienne Provost.
They were mostly unmarried, and no umbilical cord tied them to a farm or family. Land ownership never entered their minds, for these men were the complete sons of the wilderness, the true White Indians. They shared Boone’s illiteracy and stoicism; and their dreams of wealth, if they ever had any, were as foredoomed as Daniel’s. Their business was the killing of beaver and De Voto rightly called it “as ruthless a commerce as any in human history.” Francis Parkman, the historian, was not far wrong when he referred to them as “half-savage men.” They had to be to survive, and they could move safely through the high country precisely because their language and dress and sometime bedmates were Indian. Among them were the managers who led the parties, and arranged for the marketing of pelts in St. Louis or Santa Fe. The most remarkable of these men was surely Jedediah Smith.
At the age of twenty-three Jed Smith went upriver with Ashley, and ten years later he was lanced to death by the Comanches on the Cimarron. In the interim he scouted nearly every major stream west of the Mississippi, survived the three worst massacres of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, and compiled a list of firsts that stands by itself. In his quest for untrapped beaver he traveled farther and saw more of the West than any of his contemporaries—including Lewis and Clark. Had he taken the time to put his
