Blood and Treasure, page 13
Even taking into account Filson’s propensity for syrupy exaggeration, Boone and his troop found the distinction between this new country and North Carolina stark.* So populated had the Yadkin become by the late 1760s that it seemed to be closing in upon itself; where the valley had once teemed with wildfowl it was now difficult to flush a single turkey for Sunday supper. Yet in Kentucky one merely had to rattle a canebrake to cause a cloud of gobblers to dim the sun.
Boone and his brother-in-law John Stewart were seasoned huntsmen, used to stalking deer during the day’s “two rises”—the sun’s at dawn and the moon’s at dusk. Much like Boone and Hill two winters earlier, however, the trackers found their skills redundant—they need only lie in wait near the area’s multiple salt licks for the game to come to them. Such was their haul that within weeks the men were cursing themselves for not having brought more packhorses.
During Gen. Braddock’s long march into the interior, Daniel Boone was beguiled by the Irish-born teamster John Findlay’s tales of an Edenlike land teeming with game west of the Appalachians that the Indians called Kanta-ke, which translated roughly as “place of lush meadows.” Findlay had previously dropped down from the Ohio River into the Bluegrass section of the territory to trade with the Indians. Although the Appalachian Mountain Range was thought to preclude exploration of Kanta-ke from the east, Findlay further intrigued Boone with the story of a rumored gap in the impassable Cumberland Mountain that led into this tramontane paradise.
In November of 1769 Boone turned thirty-five. From his June arrival at Red Lick Fork, some five months earlier, until his birthday, neither he nor members of his party had picked up any Indian sign—the tiny cairns of rocks or twigs that warned of evil spirits, the pictographs blazed into trees to mark a trail. They had not even seen a moccasin print embedded into the spongy turf. The frontiersmen had entered Kanta-ke prepared to fight for their take of peltry if need be, but their guard had dropped as the weeks passed and their fortune in hides piled high. This may be the reason, three days before Christmas, Boone and Stewart were caught unawares and captured by a party of Shawnee without a shot being fired.
* * *
There was a complicated dynamic at work when it came to encounters between the European American intruders and the indigenous peoples of the frontier. Sometimes a captured white might be killed quickly or slowly, such as the militiaman made to dance while being dismembered alive during the Cherokee wars. At others he or she could be held hostage to trade for Indians held as prisoners. There was also the Native American tradition of adoption. The practice depended upon multiple circumstances. A captive’s age carried weight, although there was no hard-and-fast cutoff line. The Indians also took into account how depleted their tribe’s clan or band may have become through battle, disease, or starvation due to failed harvests. In the end, however, a prisoner adopted and acclimated into Indian society enjoyed the same rights and freedoms as any man or woman born into the culture.
Indians had been raiding each other’s towns and villages in these “mourning wars” for centuries for just such repopulation objectives. And though they generally viewed whites as an inferior race—having been created from the Great Spirit’s lesser body parts—they also now saw no reason why captured settlers could not fill the same purpose. The adoption ceremony itself usually required the captive’s clothes to be burned in a symbolic fire, after which they were scrubbed with pungent greases or oils, the ablution serving to “wash out their white blood.” Certain tribes, the Shawnee among them, also believed in the concept of transmogrification, or “covering the dead,” whereby a medicine man’s application of mystical rituals allowed a captured prisoner, including white men and women, to assume the identity of deceased kinsmen or kinswomen.
Finally and somewhat counterintuitively, there were occasions when trespassing whites taken in ambush or battle were allowed to walk free with what today would be construed as a mere summons or stern warning. Much depended upon the leader of the Indian party.
Two years earlier, while separated from William Hill along the Big Sandy, Boone had been awakened one snowy night by a Cherokee waving a tomahawk in his face. He did not panic. For all the fantastical attributes and feats attributed to Boone by a succession of hagiographers, he was by all accounts that truly rare breed of human for whom Hemingway seemingly coined his definition of courage—“grace under pressure.” On that occasion, with a host of Indian braves eyeing his flowing locks, Boone had flashed his toothsome grin (which thereafter secured him the nickname “Wide Mouth” among the Cherokee) and offered to share what little provisions he carried. After the meal, and possibly the passing of his flask, his captors allowed him to keep his horse and weapons and ordered him to vacate the territory. Boone was undoubtedly fortunate that to this point during their Big Sandy hunt, he and Hill had fared so poorly that he was bereft of any skins, which the Cherokee would have, rightfully, considered their own.
But the Shawnee who now took Boone and his brother-in-law were not as susceptible to the Wide Mouth’s charms, if, indeed, what must have appeared to the Indians as the wretched creatures standing before them claimed any. After six months in the wilderness, the two white men—their mended and re-mended clothes smeared from head to toe with the dried viscera of their kills, and no doubt stinking like the carcasses with which they had littered the woods—must have seemed a sorry sight. After Boone’s and Stewart’s hands were bound, they were marched back to the Indian camp, where Boone again attempted to affect a hail-fellow bonhomie. The head of the hunting party, however, was a wily subchief known as Captain Will, a half-blood Virginia-born William Emery, who now lived in Chillicothe across the Ohio River. He was not about to be taken in by Boone’s guile and charisma no matter how wide the white man’s smile shone through the dirt encrusting his face.
Although there are no artist’s depictions of Captain Will, the many whites with whom he crossed paths, including Boone, were fairly unanimous in their descriptions: although he was taller than the average Indian, he had inherited his Shawnee mother’s copper skin tone as well as high cheekbones sharp enough to cut falling silk. He was also said to comport himself with the mien of a natural leader. Aside from his outsize height, it is doubtful that most whites would have been able to physically distinguish Captain Will from his followers. For many native tribes, hair and hairstyles were intimately tied to heritage and identity, and in parlous times the Eastern Woodlands Indians often cut their long, braided hair and plucked their scalps smooth with a mussel shell, leaving only a lock of hair at the crown, which they bear-greased to stand upright. Such did Captain Will’s nearly bald head, streaked with vermilion, now appear to his white prisoners. It was said that Captain Will was partial to vermilion. Boone surmised that Captain Will had indeed had the white blood washed out of him.
As one who knew the white man intimately, the former William Emery was also imbued with a deep strain of cynicism toward the Anglo-American pioneers and settlers. He was particularly galled by what he considered their habitual false promises and propensity for playing one tribe off another. The newcomers insisted on borders to protect themselves from the red race, yet they consistently violated those boundaries when their interests demanded it. Had not the Great Father in London promised the Indians all the lands west of the Appalachians a mere six years earlier? If so, by what right did the Cherokee and Iroquois have to barter away Shawnee hunting grounds at Hard Labor and at Fort Stanwix? And if these new treaties overrode the British Proclamation of 1763, what future pacts would override them?
Further, Captain Will continued, it was all too convenient for the white man to look down on the indigenous peoples’ nomadic tendencies as nothing more than slothful vagrancy. That the Indians had not put down permanent roots and taken up the plow and loom was merely an excuse to rationalize the seizure of their land. But did Boone not think that the tribes would notice the white man’s own peripatetic migrations to slash and burn more trees, to desecrate the earth with more farm furrows, to fence in the open land created by the Great Spirit the Shawnees called the “Master of Life”? These were all existential grievances Captain Will shared with the broader Shawnee Nation.
But perhaps what vexed the Indians most was closer at hand, staring up at Captain Will with his hands bound by buffalo tugs—that is, one of the men representative of the wastefulness of the American hunters in their habit of simply shooting an animal for its pelt and leaving to rot heaps of fine venison or buffalo meat that could feed an entire Indian family.
From Captain Will’s and his tribesmen’s point of view, this went further than the theft of Indian meat and the white man’s habit of littering the meadows and forest floors with rotting carcasses. It was a question of spiritual morality. The great pleasure and the pointed mystery the Native Americans took from studying the animals they hunted lay in the connectivity, even the kinship, they sensed in the winged creatures and four-legged beasts. From this sprang their rituals of the hunt, to give thanks to a beast taken down for providing food, even to ask forgiveness. Watching a white frontiersman kill a buffalo simply to boast that he had done so was incomprehensible to the Indian. Boone and his like had profaned the sacred hunt.
As it was, the Indian leader told Boone and Stewart that he had already decided that the interlopers would not walk free without paying what he considered a fair toll for their trespass along the Warrior’s Path—that is, either with their lives or with every hide and pelt they had amassed. He ordered Boone to lead him and his party to their station camp in exchange for their freedom. But Boone, still confident he could outsmart the “untutored Indian,” was not about to surrender five months’ worth of plunder so readily. Instead he guided the Indians to a temporary dressing post that held a trifling of skins.
Boone knew that the satellite site was manned by one of his Yadkin companions, likely William Cooley. On his approach he made certain to thrash through the underbrush loudly enough to give Cooley time to flee. With luck, Cooley would warn the others at the main camp on the Red Lick Fork to pack up what they could and ride hard for home. But Captain Will was no fool. Surveying the slim pickings at the dressing outpost, he cautioned Boone that his attempt at subterfuge was insulting. For the moment, he said, his braves were content to confiscate his peltry as opposed to his scalp. But Boone had best not again try to take advantage of that forbearance.
Feigning a chastened demeanor, Boone led the Indians on a winding, time-consuming path to what he hoped would be an abandoned station camp. Upon reaching the clearing, however, he was horrified to discover that though his compatriots had indeed taken flight, they had left without packing out any of the peltry. In their haste they had not only left the packhorses behind, but, for some reason, most of the company’s spare guns and ammunition as well. The Indians were ecstatic.
Captain Will had the thirteen-horse packtrain loaded with what Boone estimated was several hundred dollars’ worth of peltry—nine hundred deerskins and a few large bales of fur. A man of his word, he then furnished Boone and Stewart with a French-made fusil and enough powder and shot to provide for food on their long trudge home. Each was also given two pairs of moccasins and a swath of doeskin for patching the inevitable holes that would tear open along the 360-mile journey. Before releasing the white men, Captain Will issued an admonition couched as words of advice: “Now Brothers, go home and stay there,” he told them. “Don’t come here anymore, for this is the Indians’ hunting ground, and all the animals, skins and furs are ours.” Boone would have none of it.
That night, after pretending to head south, he and Stewart doubled back. They stole into the Indian’s remuda and unhobbled two horses. After walking the animals out of earshot, they jumped on their bare backs and rode all night. The next morning, thinking themselves secure, they paused to rest the horses. Boone was lying flat on his back on a grassy knoll when he caught the rising sun flashing off the blue steel barrel of a musket pointed at his face. Though Captain Will never dropped his mask of stoicism, his braves appeared greatly amused by the audacity and, in their eyes, stupidity of the white men. This time they again secured their prisoners’ wrists with tugs, and also tied a horse collar festooned with small bells around Boone’s neck. “Steal horse, ha?” taunted one warrior, and the rest broke into gales of laughter as they set off for the Ohio River.
Seven days later the group made camp on the south bank of the Ohio. Not knowing what plans the Shawnee had for them across the water, that night Boone and Stewart wriggled out of their leather manacles, managed to steal two rifles and a small cache of powder and balls, and crawled backward deep into an enormous canebrake while using their ramrods to flip the cane back up to cover their trails. The Indians utilized the hollow cane sprouts for everything from weaving baskets to fashioning pipes; now Boone and his brother-in-law used it as cover. As the sun broke over the eastern horizon, the two fugitives could hear the Shawnee prowling the edges of their hidey-hole. Then silence. By the time the two white men emerged around midmorning, the Indians were gone.
Boone and Stewart took off southeast at a steady lope, pausing only to roast the occasional raccoon or muskrat and scoop water from streams. Five days later they caught up to their fellow hunters along the banks of the Rockcastle forty miles from the abandoned station camp. Boone was not the sort to reprimand or even openly question the judgment of his companions. He had not been present when the decision was made to abandon their entire kit to the Indians, and, to his way of thinking, squabbling over it now did not change their circumstances. He viewed life with an admirable equanimity—or, as he put it later, “I firmly believe that it takes but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatever state fortune may place him.”
As for Captain Will, that he had kept his original promise to free Boone and Stewart once they led him to the station camp evinced a level of incredulity in contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous retellings of Daniel Boone’s capture. Even the typically circumspect biographer Lyman Draper betrays a sniff of condescension when he marvels over the Shawnee leader’s “clever shew [sic] of mercy.”
Some, of course, were eager to credit Captain Will’s “mercy” to his father’s white blood flowing through his veins. Yet for all of early America’s popular descriptions of the “vagabond depredators” of the woodlands, it is an interesting thought experiment to contemplate how a mob of white settlers might have dealt with a pair of “savages” who had been apprehended poaching animals on their property.
Upon reaching the Rockcastle, no small portion of Boone’s disappointment and frustration was salved by finding that Findlay, Cooley, Mooney, and Holden had only that morning been joined by his brother, Squire Boone, and another Yadkin man, Alexander Neely. The two, as promised, had followed Boone’s trail through the Cumberland Gap and arrived with resupplies, including horses, weapons, ammunition, and beaver traps. The traps, eight inches across the jaws, settled it for Boone. Even in his youth it was noted that his innate patience was equaled only by his stubbornness. Further, with Captain Will riding north with his hard-earned peltry, Boone was again broke.
Most of the provisioning for Boone’s long hunts, most particularly those for powder and shot, was done on credit. Because of the sparse hunting conditions when he had stayed closer to home to hunt with James over the past few years, his debts had accumulated faster than he could pay them off. One North Carolina lawyer recalled Boone having had “more suits entered against him for debt than any other man of his day.”
In the end, however, Captain Will and his Shawnee band had no idea that Daniel Boone was not a man to be exiled so easily from such rich country. He had not been hunting for half a year to come away with nothing but the clothes on his back. He was also well aware that, at this point in North America’s history, the beaver had become the staple of the New World’s fur trade.
16
“WITHOUT … EVEN A HORSE OR A DOG”
Through much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the beaver was to European fashion what the horse was to military might. The soft felt undercoat of the Castor canadensis so dominated Europe’s markets for men’s headwear that between 1700 and 1770 British milliners exported over twenty-one million individual beaver hats across the channel to the Continent. Europe’s stock of beaver had long ago given out to overtrapping, which left the North American colonists sitting on a veritable monopoly. In the 1600s it is estimated that as many as four hundred million beavers populated the continent, with a beaver dam built on every half mile on every stream of every watershed in Canada and the contiguous United States. Individual animals of this semiaquatic species, which can weigh up to sixty pounds, prefer to build their watery “lodges” in colder climates afforded either by latitude or elevation. The British and French colonies had an abundance of each.
The Native Americans of the Ohio Country had for decades exchanged beaver pelts with white traders for weapons, tools, blankets, and beads. One French Jesuit priest reported an Indian telling him that “the beaver does everything perfectly well; it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives … in short, it makes everything.” It was (likely apocryphally) reported that the runnels and creeks splashing out of the western slopes of the Cumberland and Allegheny ranges were so rife with beaver that a trapper could walk on the backs of the sleek animals from one bank to the other without getting his moccasins wet—that is, as long as the man was hard enough and restless enough to risk his scalp living beyond the fringes of the eastern settlements. Daniel Boone was such a man. Despite their encounter with Captain Will, he and Stewart were determined to return to Kentucky to recoup at least a portion of the bounty they had lost to the raiders. Squire Boone and Alexander Neely were equally anxious for wilderness adventures. The others preferred to return to their homes.
