Blood and Treasure, page 33
Though Tecumseh’s and Dragging Canoe’s lights blazed to the end, the tribal authors of the mid-eighteenth century’s Indian Wars were just as likely to have suffered the ignoble fate of the broken and abandoned Ottawa war chief Pontiac. The Mingo orator Logan, for instance, whose “Lament” Thomas Jefferson considered moving enough to include in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, never forgot nor forgave the Americans for murdering his wife and family. After fighting alongside the British auxiliary Mohawk warriors during the revolution, Logan was said to have lost himself to the white man’s “firewater” and, in 1780, was killed by unknown Indians, possibly on the orders of Iroquois headmen jealous of his notoriety. It took eleven more years for Logan’s tribesmen, to paraphrase Dickens, to tighten the chains of death that had been fitted in life. In March 1791, the killer of Logan’s family, Daniel Greathouse, and his wife were captured by a Mingo war party on an Ohio River flatboat bound for western Kentucky. The Indians killed the vessel’s crew immediately but, recognizing Greathouse, took revenge by slowly torturing both husband and wife to their deaths.
There is no little irony in the fact that the one tribal war leader whom fate allowed to die peacefully was the “white savage” Simon Girty, who in February of 1818 passed away at the age of seventy-six on his Canadian farm. It is not recorded how much solace Girty took from outliving by twenty-two years Henry Hamilton, the British officer who represented the Crown’s ultimate betrayal of the Indian nations of America’s northwest woods. Hamilton, who had been released as a prisoner of war at the close of the revolution and transferred to a post in Antigua, died on the island at the age of sixty-two in 1796.
Simon Girty’s passing occurred within the same week as the death of his cohort’s most zealous antagonist, George Rogers Clark. Clark, whom the Virginia statesman George Mason ostentatiously labeled the “Conqueror of the Northwest,” never did achieve his ultimate goal of capturing Fort Detroit. In fact, his anticlimactic razing of the Shawnee villages along the Great Miami River in 1782 was the last expedition he led across the Ohio before the revolution’s end.
Amazingly, Clark was still only thirty years old when the Treaty of Paris was signed, but his martial expeditions continued. In the mid-1780s, riding at the head of an army of Virginia militiamen, Clark negotiated several treaties with various Native American tribes along the border of the Illinois-Indiana territories. Each failed to hold, and in 1786 he precipitated what was destined to be called the Northwest Indian War against Tecumseh and his allies by leading a force of twelve hundred Kentucky draftees into Indiana. The campaign was a disaster. A quarter of his impressed troops mutinied over a dearth of food and ammunition. And though Clark managed to broker a fig-leaf ceasefire, it was promptly ignored by Indian raiders. It was during this campaign that Clark’s reputation was forever sullied by accusations that he had spent much of the march in a drunken haze.
The Virginia legislature declined to investigate the dereliction-of-duty charges against Clark and instead awarded him a 150,000-acre land grant in southern Indiana in gratitude for his war service. It was to this homestead where he retired as his descent into alcoholism propelled him into deep debt. He attempted to revive his fortunes by offering his military expertise to revolutionary France’s efforts to reclaim the Louisiana Territory from Spain. But this only resulted in President Washington threatening to dispatch a federal army to subdue any Americans violating the neutrality between the United States and the European powers.
Thereafter a series of strokes and injuries incapacitated Clark—his left leg was amputated after being severely burned in a gristmill accident—and he was forced to return to Louisville on the Falls of the Ohio, where he was cared for by his sister Lucy and her husband, William Croghan, until his death at sixty-five in 1818.* In what Clark considered a final indignation, his historical legacy was dwarfed by his younger brother William’s groundbreaking expedition to the Pacific with Meriwether Lewis.
Mixed fates also awaited the men with whom Daniel Boone had settled and protected what was to become the state of Kentucky. Some, like Benjamin Logan and Boone’s fellow long hunter Michael Stoner, died in the arms of their families. Logan, after leading the effort to attain Kentucky’s statehood, dropped dead from a stroke in 1802 at the age of sixty in his home at Shelbyville, Kentucky. Stoner passed thirteen years later, at sixty-seven, at his own home not far away. For others, such as James Harrod, mystery continues to cloud their demises.
There are those who contend that Daniel Boone’s enduring legacy may have been shared by James Harrod if not for the latter’s untimely—and mysterious—death at about the age of forty-five. After the revolution, Harrod married and settled outside of Harrodsburg in the small community of Boiling Springs. There he fathered a daughter, and with holdings of over twenty thousand acres of prime bottomland, he appeared poised to become one of the civic leaders responsible for ushering the territory into the union. But in February 1792—mere months before Kentucky achieved statehood—Harrod abruptly wrote out his last will and testament. He informed his family that he was joining two other treasure seekers in search of a long-lost silver mine rumored to have been discovered in eastern Kentucky sometime in the 1760s. He was never seen again. Although it is just as likely that Harrod succumbed to disease, fatal accident, or Indian attack, his wife and daughter went to their graves convinced that he had been murdered by his associates. Fortune hunters to this day continue to comb the Appalachian Plateau near the three forks of the Kentucky River searching for the mythical mine.
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For some time before and after the final raid on Black Hoof’s village, Daniel Boone’s various business ventures were profitable enough that Maysville County tax records show him purchasing seven slaves, including several mothers and their children, whom he put to work in his tavern and store. But Boone’s Achilles’ heel as an entrepreneur had always been his naivete as a land speculator. It was this flaw that once again crashed his financial world.
Boone’s stab at speculation during the early stages of the Kentucky land boom eventually resulted in a plethora of lawsuits and court rulings against him. In many cases he had failed to properly register a number of the tracts that he had received as recompense from eastern conglomerates and landjobbers for his scouting missions. Over time, most of this acreage was seized and resold. But there was a hitch: Boone still owed massive amounts of property tax on land he could no longer call his own. Moreover, evicted settlers who had paid Boone for the plots were naturally inclined to appeal to the courts to recover their investments. Despite his business foibles, Boone was an honest man with a strong sense of decency, and he vowed to repay every debt he owed. To that end, as his son Nathan told Lyman Draper, “Little by little his wealth melted away.”
Boone’s complete bankruptcy was temporarily averted by the several postwar terms he served in the Virginia State Assembly. But even as a respected and iconic statesman, he could not outrun the writs and summonses piling up against him. In November of 1798, with Boone having departed Richmond, a territorial judge ordered the Mason County sheriff to serve a warrant and arrest Boone, who was in arrears to various entities for the lordly sum of ₤6,000, over $100,000 today. When the lawman arrived at Boone’s one-room cabin in the Kentucky woods, Boone and his family were gone.
The old frontiersman had become so disillusioned with what he felt was the ingratitude of the people of the territory he had “purchased with a vast expence [sic] of blood and treasure,” that he made a decision that heretofore he would have deemed unthinkable. He decided to abandon the United States.
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As the eighteenth century came to a close, Spanish authorities in New Orleans were ever more fearful of British Canada’s designs on their holdings west of the Mississippi. As a buffer, they sought to populate the interior by offering midwestern land to American pioneers at greatly reduced prices. An impoverished Boone accepted an overture from Spain to lead a train of families to settle a large tract in the community of Femme Osage on the north side of the Missouri River, some thirty miles west of Saint Charles. Such was the frontiersman’s fame that the Spanish governor in Saint Louis waived Boone’s entry fee as well as the stipulation that all émigrés must convert to the Roman Catholic faith.
Throughout his life, the heart of Boone’s identity had been marked by his strong and affectionate attachment to family. So it was that as he moved west in the fall of 1799, he and Rebecca were joined in their exodus by four of their progeny—their sons Daniel Morgan and the teenage Nathan and his new bride, the sixteen-year-old Olive Van Bibber; and their daughters Suzy and Jemima and sons-in-law Will Hays and Flanders Callaway. At the last moment Daniel’s brother Squire decided to join the entourage of fifteen or so families herding their cattle, horses, and hogs toward yet another American frontier.
Much like his older brother, Squire had led a peripatetic life since the end of the revolution. Hobbled by his multiple wounds, some of which would never fully heal, Squire had attempted to settle in the Mississippi Territory, in New Orleans, in Spanish Florida, and had even returned to Pennsylvania to live with relatives for several years. Yet, again like his brother, he proved unsophisticated in the world of business, and by the early nineteenth century found himself hounded by creditors and tax collectors to the point where he was once reduced to stealing food from a slave to feed his family. Along his travels Squire had also become immersed in the Baptist faith and fancied himself a lay circuit preacher.
Though Squire’s wife, Jane, exhausted from their many relocations, declined to cross the Mississippi with him, he was certain that she would relent once he had established a homestead in Missouri. This was never to be, and five years later Squire returned east to settle with Jane, their four sons, and his brother Samuel’s four surviving sons just north of the Ohio River in the Indiana Territory. There his financial fortunes finally turned, and while serving as justice of the peace for what is today Boone Township, Indiana, he acquired a large tract of land upon which he built a stone house, operated a thriving quarry and gunsmith business, and founded one of the territory’s first churches.
Squire Boone would die of heart failure at the age of seventy in August 1815. His final request was that he be buried in a cavern on his property, the same cave where he and his brother Daniel had once hidden from hostile Indians decades earlier.
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During the Boone party’s trek to Spanish Missouri, Suzy Boone contracted what was then known as bilious fever, most likely malaria. Only days after the emigrant train reached its destination, she died after a short vigil. She was two weeks shy of her fortieth birthday. It took the heartbroken Daniel and Rebecca several months to recover from the demise of their eldest daughter, yet within the year Boone seemed rejuvenated by his new surroundings. He spent his time hunting and trapping the wild Missouri River’s feeder tributaries with his sons and sons-in-law while, as in the old days, leading attempts to reconcile disputes between the pioneers and the often-hostile Osage Indians naturally suspicious of the intruders settling on what they considered their lands.
Boone was initially angry when the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 allowed the United States to take possession of the territory and invalidate his Spanish land grants. But he eventually took the decision with equanimity and was content to move himself and Rebecca first into a cabin on Daniel Morgan Boone’s land and, later, onto the property of Nathan and Olive. There he delighted in regaling his dozens of grandchildren with adventure stories from his youth. These included the eight children his son-in-law Joseph Scholl brought to Missouri from Kentucky after the untimely death of the thirty-six-year-old Levina Boone Scholl. Three years later, in 1805, the Boones received word that their daughter Rebecca Boone Goe, who had also remained in Kentucky, was dead from “consumption” at thirty-seven. This left Jemima as the only Boone daughter to survive past what was then considered childbearing age.
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Like almost all men who had spent their lives wandering cold and wet forests, the elderly Boone suffered from bouts of near-disabling rheumatic disorders in all his joints, which often curtailed his hunts. But despite the fact that his thinning hair had turned badger gray, and his patchy white skin highlighted his red-rimmed eyes, those eyes never lost their light, particularly when his old friend Simon Kenton paid a visit to Femme Osage around Boone’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1809. Boone, ever the optimist, had spent the occasion carving a new powder horn, polishing his rifle, and hoping that he could negotiate the steps from his rocking chair and disappear into the woods for one more adventure with the frontiersman who had once saved his life. It was not to be, although he and Kenton passed several weeks reliving old times.
Kenton’s travails had been equal to Boone’s. Over time he had lost all his Kentucky lands and landed in debtor’s prison. It was only through the largesse of his son and daughter, with whom he now lived, that he had not died behind bars. As it was, Kenton returned to Kentucky long before Boone summoned the energy for one final long hunt. That occurred in the fall of 1810 when, at the age of seventy-six, he and his sons-in-law Will Hays and Flanders Callaway joined a company of visiting Kentucky riflemen journeying up the Missouri. Hays later reported that their party made it as far as the Yellowstone River—an assertion never verified—although it is known that the company returned after six months in the mountains laden with valuable beaver and otter furs. A mountain man who had crossed paths with Boone on this final wilderness trek described him thusly: “The old man was still erect in form, strong in limb, and unflinching in spirit.”
There are some who would attempt to deconstruct the myth of Daniel Boone as merely a creation of his early biographers. In their eyes, Boone was just one of many frontiersmen and long hunters who explored and settled the lands west of the Appalachians in the mid-1700s. And while it is true that the likes of John Filson, Lyman Draper, and others certainly created a process of conferring lasting celebrity and fame upon Boone, his lifetime of adventures and achievements were very much real. Boone’s traverse of the Cumberland Gap into Kanta-ke did indeed resonate among white settlers hungering for new territory. Boone’s rescue of his kidnapped daughter Jemima did lay the basis for James Fenimore Cooper’s most famous narrative. Boone’s epic escape and wilderness journey to warn Boonesborough of an imminent Indian attack and his subsequent leadership in the defense of that lonely outpost did have an impact on the western front of the American Revolution.
By no means did Filson or Draper invent Daniel Boone as the first American frontier hero. In the end, their roles as interviewers, researchers, and writers was only to broadcast and publicize the outsize life of a genuine pioneer and adventurer.
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Some years ago, a visiting lecturer from the history department of China’s People’s Liberation Army surprised an auditorium at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College when he mentioned that the United States had undoubtedly fought the longest war in recorded history. The American officers in attendance were left to wonder what the man could possibly mean. Even today, as America approaches nearly two decades in Afghanistan, the country’s armed forces have never slogged through anything like Europe’s vicious Thirty Years’ War, much less the continent’s Hundred Years’ War. The answer came in the lecturer’s next breath: he said that he was referring to the three-hundred-year conflict against the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous peoples.
“From the perspective of military historians this was a dubious assertion,” the history professor Peter Maslowski noted in an essay he contributed to the book Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars. “Few of them viewed the Euro-Americans’ struggle against the indigenous peoples as a single, continuous war of subjugation.”
Upon further reflection, however, Maslowski and others came around to the Chinese general’s point of view. In fact, Maslowski wrote, “Euro-Americans did wage a protracted war to conquer Indian nations in order to acquire their land and its resources.”
The proof, of course, lies in the numbers. Of today’s more than 330 million Americans, some 46 million are descendants of pioneers and settlers who passed through the Cumberland Gap. Before Boone’s death in 1820 at the age of eighty-five—outliving his wife of fifty-six years Rebecca by seven years—the pathfinder most associated with that famous breach in the Appalachians survived long enough to see the United States grow from its original thirteen states to twenty-three, including Kentucky, accepted into the Union almost three decades earlier. In his lifetime Boone also witnessed six presidential campaigns, while the country’s population increased eightfold from the day he first rode through the notch in the mountains.
Men rarely deviate from their life’s philosophy, particularly in old age. No less a personage than Alexander Hamilton recognized this in Federalist Paper No. 27, employing the proverbial phrase, “Man is very much a creature of habit,” while arguing for a standing American military force. Daniel Boone was no different. He had once been a man of a certain place and time, and as the first frontier he had helped tame expanded, matured, and eventually disappeared under the trappings of “civilization,” he, like so many other pathfinders, passed down to his lineage his sense of wonder and adventure.
