James Baldwin

The settlement of the wilderness beyond the Alleghany Mountains was promoted by native pioneers. In his peaceful habitation on the banks of the Yadkin River in North Carolina, Daniel Boone, the illustrious hunter, had heard Finley, a trader, describe a tract of land, west of Virginia, as the richest in North America, or in the world. In May, 1769, leaving his wife and offspring, having Finley as his pilot, and four others as companions, the young man, of about three and twenty, wandered forth through the wilderness of America “in quest of the country of Kentucky,” known to the savages as “the dark and bloody ground.” After a long and fatiguing journey through mountain ranges, the party found themselves in June on the Red River, a tributary of the Kentucky, and from the top of an eminence surveyed with delight the beautiful plain that stretched to the northwest. Here they built their shelter and began to reconnoiter the country, and to hunt.

Daniel Boone.

All the kinds of wild beasts that were natural to America—the stately elk, the timid deer, the antlered stag, the wild-cat, the bear, the panther, and the wolf—couched among the canes, or roamed over the rich grasses, which even beneath the thickest shade sprung luxuriantly out of the generous soil. The buffaloes cropped fearlessly the herbage, or browsed on the leaves of the reed, and were more frequent than cattle in the settlements of Carolina. Sometimes there were hundreds in a drove, and round the salt licks their numbers were amazing.

The summer in which, for the first time, a party of white men enjoyed the brilliancy of nature near and in the valley of the Elkhorn passed away in the occupations of exploring parties and the chase. But, one by one, Boone’s companions dropped off, till he was left alone with John Stewart. They jointly found unceasing delight in the wonders of the forest, till, one evening near the Kentucky River, they were taken prisoners by a band of Indians, wanderers like themselves. They escaped, and were joined by Boone’s brother; so that when Stewart was soon after killed by savages, Boone still had his brother to share with him the dangers and the attractions of the wilderness, the building and occupying of the first cottage in Kentucky.

In the spring of 1770 that brother returned to the settlements for horses and supplies of ammunition, leaving the renowned hunter “by himself, without bread, or salt, or even a horse or dog.” The idea of a beloved wife anxious for his safety, tinged his thoughts with sadness; but otherwise the cheerful, meditative man, careless of wealth, knowing the use of the rifle, not the plow, of a strong robust frame, in the vigorous health of early manhood, ignorant of books, but versed in the forest and in forest life, ever fond of tracking the deer on foot, away from men, yet in his disposition humane, generous, and gentle, was happy in the uninterrupted succession of sylvan pleasures. He held unconscious intercourse with beauty old as creation.

One calm summer’s evening, as he climbed a commanding ridge, and looked upon the remote, venerable mountains and the nearer ample plains, and caught a glimpse in the distance of the Ohio, which bounded the land of his affections with majestic grandeur, his heart exulted in the region he had discovered. All things were still. Not a breeze so much as shook a leaf. He kindled a fire near a fountain of sweet water, and feasted on the loin of a buck. He was no more alone than a bee among flowers, but communed familiarly with the whole universe of life. Nature was his intimate, and she responded to his intelligence.

For him the rocks and the fountains, the leaf and the blade of grass, had life; the cooling air laden with the wild perfume came to him as a friend; the dewy morning wrapped him in its embrace; the trees stood up gloriously round about him as so many myriads of companions. All forms wore the character of desire or peril. But how could he be afraid? Triumphing over danger, he knew no fear. The perpetual howling of the wolves by night round his cottage or his bivouac in the brake was his diversion; and by day he had joy in surveying the various species of animals that surrounded him. He loved the solitude better than the towered city or the hum of business.

Near the end of 1770, his faithful brother came back to meet him at the old camp. Shortly after they proceeded together to the Cumberland River, giving names to the different waters; and he then returned to his wife and children, fixed in his purpose, at the risk of life and fortune, to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucky, which he esteemed a second Paradise.

II

In March, 1775, Daniel Boone, with a body of enterprising companions, proceeded to mark out a path up Powell’s valley, and through the mountains and canebrakes beyond. On the twenty-fifth of the month they were waylaid by Indians, who killed two men and wounded another very severely. Two days later the savages killed and scalped two more. “Now,” wrote Daniel Boone, “is the time to keep the country while we are in it. If we give way now, it will ever be the case,” and he pressed forward to the Kentucky River. There, on the first day of April, at the distance of about sixty yards from its west bank, near the mouth of Otter Creek, he began a stockade fort, which took the name of Boonesboro.

At that place, while the congress at Philadelphia was groping irresolutely in the dark, seventeen men assembled as representatives of the four “towns” that then formed the seed of the state. Among these children of nature was Daniel Boone, the pioneer of the party. His colleague, Richard Calloway, was one of the founders of Kentucky, and one of its early martyrs. The town of St. Asaph sent John Floyd, a surveyor, who emigrated from southwestern Virginia; an able writer, respected for his culture and dignity of manner; of innate good breeding; ready to defend the weak; heedless of his own life if he could recover women and children who had been made captive by the savages; destined to do good service, and survive the dangers of western life till American independence should be fought for and won.

From the settlement at Boiling Spring came James Harrod, the same who, in 1774, had led a party of forty-one to Harrodsburg, and during the summer of that year had built the first log-cabin in Kentucky; a tall, erect, and resolute backwoodsman; unlettered but not ignorant; intrepid yet gentle; never weary of kind offices to those around him; a skillful hunter, for whom the rifle had a companionship, and the wilderness a charm.

These and their associates, the fathers of Kentucky, seventeen in all, met on the 23d of May, beneath the great elm tree of Boonesboro, outside of the fort, on the thick sward of the fragrant white clover. The convention having been organized, prayers were read by a minister of the Church of England. A speech was then delivered to the convention in behalf of the proprietary purchases of the land from the Cherokees. To it a committee, of which Calloway was the head, made reply. “Deeply impressed,” they said, “with a sense of the importance of the trust our constituents have reposed in us, we will attempt the task with vigor, not doubting but unanimity will insure us success. That we have a right, as a political body, without giving umbrage to Great Britain, or any of the colonies, to frame rules for the government of our little society, cannot be doubted by any sensible or unbiased mind.”

So reasoned the fathers of Kentucky. In their legislation, it was their chief care to copy after the happy pattern of the English laws. Their colony they called Transylvania. For defense against the savages, they organized a militia; they discountenanced profane swearing and Sabbath breaking; they took thought for preventing the waste of game, and improving the breed of horses; and by solemn agreement they established as the basis of their constitution the annual choice of delegates; taxes to be raised by the convention alone; perfect religious freedom and general toleration.

Thus a little band of hunters put themselves at the head of the countless hosts of civilization in establishing the great principle of intellectual freedom. Long as the shadows of the western mountain shall move round with the sun, long as the rivers that gush from those mountains shall flow toward the sea, long as seedtime and harvest shall return, that rule shall remain the law of the West.

The state of Kentucky honors the memory of the plain, simple hearted man, who is best known as its pioneer. He was kindly in his nature, and never wronged a human being, not even an Indian, nor, indeed, animal life of any kind. “I with others have fought Indians,” he would say; “but I do not know that I ever killed one. If I did, it was in battle, and I never knew it.” In woodcraft he was acknowledged to be the first among men. This led him to love solitude, and to hover on the frontier, with no abiding place, accompanied by the wife of his youth, who was the companion of his long life and travel. When, at last, death put them both to rest, Kentucky reclaimed their bones from their graves far up the Missouri; and now they lie buried on the hill above the cliffs of the Kentucky River, overlooking the lovely valley of the capital of that commonwealth. Around them are emblems of wilderness life; the turf of the blue grass lies lightly above them; and they are laid with their faces turned upward and westward, and their feet toward the setting sun.

Such is the account which George Bancroft, the first of American historians, gives of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky, and of the founding of the commonwealth of which Boone was the earliest and most distinguished promoter. Few other works have contributed so much to the dignity and distinction of our literature as has Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” from which this extract has been taken.