CHAPTER XIV

IN THE KANAWHA VALLEY

During his early years on the Kanawha, Boone kept a small store at Point Pleasant. Later, he moved to the neighborhood of Charleston, where he was engaged in the usual variety of occupations--piloting immigrants; as deputy surveyor of Kanawha County, surveying lands for settlers and speculators; taking small contracts for victualing the militia, who were frequently called out to protect the country from Indian forays; and in hunting. Some of his expeditions took him to the north of the Ohio, where he had several narrow escapes from capture and death at the hands of the enemy, and even into his old haunts on the Big Sandy, the Licking, and the Kentucky.

He traveled much, for a frontiersman. In 1788 he went with his wife and their son Nathan by horseback to the old Pennsylvania home in Berks County, where they spent a month with kinsfolk and friends. We find him in Maysville, on a business trip, during the year; indeed, there are evidences of numerous subsequent visits to that port. In May of the following year he was on the Monongahela River with a drove of horses for sale, Brownsville then being an important market for ginseng, horses, and cattle; and in the succeeding July he writes to a client, for whom he had done some surveying, that he would be in Philadelphia during the coming winter.

In October, 1789, there came to him, as the result of a popular petition, the appointment of lieutenant-colonel of Kanawha County--the first military organization in the valley; and in other ways he was treated with marked distinction by the primitive border folk of the valley, both because of his brilliant career in Kentucky and the fact that he was a surveyor and could write letters. One who knew him intimately at this time has left a pleasing description of the man, which will assist us in picturing him as he appeared to his new neighbors: "His large head, full chest, square shoulders, and stout form are still impressed upon my mind. He was (I think) about five feet ten inches in height, and his weight say 175. He was solid in mind as well as in body, never frivolous, thoughtless, or agitated; but was always quiet, meditative, and impressive, unpretentious, kind, and friendly in his manner. He came very much up to the idea we have of the old Grecian philosophers--particularly Diogenes."

By the summer of 1790, Indian raids again became almost unbearable. Fresh robberies and murders were daily reported in Kentucky, and along the Ohio and the Wabash. The expedition of Major J. F. Hamtramck, of the Federal Army, against the tribesmen on the Wabash, resulted in the burning of a few villages and the destruction of much corn; but Colonel Josiah Harmar's expedition in October against the towns on the Scioto and the St. Joseph, at the head of nearly 1,500 men, ended in failure and a crushing defeat, although the Indian losses were so great that the army was allowed to return to Cincinnati unmolested. Boone does not appear to have taken part in these operations, his militiamen probably being needed for home protection.

The following year the General Government for the first time took the field against the Indians in earnest. For seven years it had attempted to bring the tribesmen to terms by means of treaties, but without avail. Roused to fury by the steady increase of settlement north as well as south of the Ohio, the savages were making life a torment to the borderers. War seemed alone the remedy. In June, General Charles Scott, of Kentucky, raided the Miami and Wabash Indians. Two months later General James Wilkinson, with five hundred Kentuckians, laid waste a Miami village and captured many prisoners. These were intended but to open the road for an expedition of far greater proportions. In October, Governor Arthur St. Clair, of the Northwest Territory, a broken-down man unequal to such a task, was despatched against the Miami towns with an ill-organized army of two thousand raw troops. Upon the fourth of November they were surprised near the principal Miami village; hundreds of the men fled at the first alarm, and of those who remained over six hundred fell during the engagement, while nearly three hundred were wounded. This disastrous termination of the campaign demoralized the West and left the entire border again open to attack--an advantage which the scalping parties did not neglect.

While this disaster was occurring, Boone was again sitting in the legislature at Richmond, where he represented Kanawha County from October 17th to December 20th. The journals of the Assembly show him to have been a silent member, giving voice only in yea and nay; but he was placed upon two then important committees--religion, and propositions and licenses. It was voted to send ammunition for the militia on the Monongahela and the Kanawha, who were to be called out for the defense of the frontier. Before leaving Richmond, Boone wrote as follows to the governor:

"Monday 13th Dec 1791

"Sir as sum purson Must Carry out the armantstion [ammunition] to Red Stone [Brownsville, Pa.,] if your Exclency should have thought me a proper purson I would undertake it on conditions I have the apintment to vitel the company at Kanhowway [Kanawha] so that I Could take Down the flowre as I paste that place I am your Excelenceys most obedent omble servant

"DAL BOONE."

Five days later the contract was awarded to him; and we find among his papers receipts, obtained at several places on his way home, for the lead and flints which he was to deliver to the various military centers. But the following May, Colonel George Clendennin sharply complains to the governor that the ammunition and rations which Boone was to have supplied to Captain Caperton's rangers had not yet been delivered, and that Clendennin was forced to purchase these supplies from others. It does not appear from the records how this matter was settled; but as there seems to have been no official inquiry, the non-delivery was probably the result of a misunderstanding.

At last, after a quarter of a century of bloodshed, the United States Government was prepared to act in an effective manner. General Anthony Wayne--"Mad Anthony," of Stony Point--after spending a year and a half in reorganizing the Western army, established himself, in the winter of 1793-94, in a log fort at Greenville, eighty miles north of Cincinnati, and built a strong outpost at Fort Recovery, on the scene of St. Clair's defeat. After resisting an attack on Fort Recovery made on the last day of June by over two thousand painted warriors from the Upper Lakes, he advanced with his legion of about three thousand well-disciplined troops to the Maumee Valley and built Fort Defiance. Final battle was given to the tribesmen on the twentieth of August at Fallen Timbers. As the result of superb charges by infantry and cavalry, in forty minutes the Indian army was defeated and scattered. The backbone of savage opposition to Northwestern settlement was broken, and at the treaty of Greenville in the following summer (1795) a peace was secured which remained unbroken for fifteen years.

Wayne's great victory over the men of the wilderness gave new heart to Kentucky and the Northwest. The pioneers were exuberant in the expression of their joy. The long war, which had lasted practically since the mountains were first crossed by Boone and Finley, had been an almost constant strain upon the resources of the country. Now no longer pent up within palisades, and expecting nightly to be awakened by the whoops of savages to meet either slaughter or still more dreaded captivity, men could go forth without fear to open up forests, to cultivate fields, and peaceably to pursue the chase.

To hunters like Boone, in particular, this great change in their lives was a matter for rejoicing. The Kanawha Valley was not as rich in game as he had hoped; but in Kentucky and Ohio were still large herds of buffaloes and deer feeding on the cane-brake and the rank vegetation of the woods, and resorting to the numerous salt-licks which had as yet been uncontaminated by settlement.

After the peace, Boone for several seasons devoted himself almost exclusively to hunting; in beaver-trapping he was especially successful, his favorite haunt for these animals being the neighboring Valley of the Gauley. His game he shared freely with neighbors, now fast increasing in numbers, and the skins and furs were shipped to market, overland or by river, as of old.

Upon removing to the Kanawha, he still had a few claims left in Kentucky, but suits for ejectment were pending over most of these. They were all decided against him, and the remaining lands were sold by the sheriff for taxes, the last of them going in 1798. His failure to secure anything for his children to inherit, was to the last a source of sorrow to Boone.

The Kanawha in time came to be distasteful to him. Settlements above and below were driving away the game, and sometimes his bag was slight; the crowding of population disturbed the serenity which he sought in deep forests; the nervous energy of these newcomers, and the avarice of some of them, annoyed his quiet, hospitable soul; and he fretted to be again free, thinking that civilization cost too much in wear and tear of spirit.

Boone had long looked kindly toward the broad, practically unoccupied lands of forest and plain west of the Mississippi. Adventurous hunters brought him glowing tales of buffaloes, grizzly bears, and beavers to be found there without number. Spain, fearing an assault upon her possessions from Canada, was just now making flattering offers to those American pioneers who should colonize her territory, and by casting their fortunes with her people strengthen them. This opportunity attracted the disappointed man; he thought the time ripe for making a move which should leave the crowd far behind, and comfortably establish him in a country wherein a hunter might, for many years to come, breathe fresh air and follow the chase untrammeled.

In 1796, Daniel Morgan Boone, his oldest son, traveled with other adventurers in boats to St. Charles County, in eastern Missouri, where they took lands under certificates of cession from Charles Dehault Delassus, the Spanish lieutenant-governor of Upper Louisiana, resident at St. Louis. There were four families, all settling upon Femme Osage Creek, six miles above its junction with the Missouri, some twenty-five miles above the town of St. Charles, and forty-five by water from St. Louis.

Thither they were followed, apparently in the spring of 1799, by Daniel Boone and wife and their younger children. The departure of the great hunter, now in his sixty-fifth year, was the occasion for a general gathering of Kanawha pioneers at the home near Charleston. They came on foot, by horseback, and in canoe, from far and near, and bade him a farewell as solemnly affectionate as though he were departing for another world; indeed, Missouri then seemed almost as far away to the West Virginians as the Klondike is to dwellers in the Mississippi basin to-day--a long journey by packhorse or by flatboat into foreign wilds, beyond the great waterway concerning which the imaginations of untraveled men often ran riot.

The hegira of the Boones, from the junction of the Elk and the Kanawha, was accomplished by boats, into which were crowded such of their scant herd of live stock as could be accommodated. Upon the way they stopped at Kentucky towns along the Ohio, either to visit friends or to obtain provisions, and attracted marked attention, for throughout the West Boone was, of course, one of the best-known men of his day. In Cincinnati he was asked why, at his time of life, he left the comforts of an established home again to subject himself to the privations of the frontier. "Too crowded!" he replied with feeling. "I want more elbow-room!"

Arriving at the little Kentucky colony on Femme Osage Creek, where the Spanish authorities had granted him a thousand arpents[17] of land abutting his son's estate upon the north, he settled down in a little log cabin erected largely by his own hands, for the fourth and last time as a pioneer. He was never again in the Kanawha Valley, and but twice in Kentucky--once to testify as to some old survey-marks made by him, and again to pay the debts which he had left when removing to Point Pleasant.

FOOTNOTE:

[17] Equivalent to about 845 English acres.

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