Part 5

"During the fall and winter of that year came an unexampled tide of emigrants, who, exchanging all the comforts of their native society and homes for settlements for themselves and their children here, came like pilgrims to a wilderness to be made secure by their arms and habitable by the toil of their lives. Through privations incredible and perils thick, thousands of men, women and children came in successive caravans, forming continuous streams of human beings, horses, cattle and other domestic animals all moving onward along a lonely and houseless path to a wild and cheerless land. Cast your eyes back on that long procession of missionaries in the cause of civilization; behold the men on foot with their trusty guns on their shoulders, driving stock and leading pack-horses; and the women, some walking with pails on their heads, others riding with children in their laps, and other children swung in baskets on horses, fastened to the tails of others going before; see them encamped at night expecting to be massacred by Indians; behold them in the month of December, in that ever-memorable season of unprecedented cold, called the 'hard winter,' traveling two or three miles a day, frequently in danger of being frozen or killed by the falling of horses on the icy and almost impassable trace, and subsisting on stinted allowances of stale bread and meat; but now lastly look at them at the destined fort, perhaps on the eve of merry Christmas, when met by the hearty welcome of friends who had come before, and cheered by fresh buffalo meat and parched corn, they rejoice at their deliverance and resolve to be contented with their lot.

"This is no vision of the imagination, it is but an imperfect description of the pilgrimage of my own father and mother."

DANIEL BOONE AND THE FOUNDING OF KENTUCKY

BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in our history as the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a true pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters, game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western North Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme frontier. There he married, built a log cabin, and hunted, chopped trees, and tilled the ground like any other frontiersman. The Alleghany Mountains still marked a boundary beyond which the settlers dared not go; for west of them lay immense reaches of frowning forest, uninhabited save by bands of warlike Indians. Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper penetrated this immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had seen and done.

In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales, determined himself to cross the mountains and find out what manner of land it was that lay beyond. With a few chosen companions he set out, making his own trail through the gloomy forest. After weeks of wandering, he at last emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky, for which, in after years, the red men and the white strove with such obstinate fury that it grew to be called "the dark and bloody ground." But when Boone first saw it, it was a fair and smiling land of groves and glades and running waters, where the open forest grew tall and beautiful, and where innumerable herds of game grazed, roaming ceaselessly to and fro along the trails they had trodden during countless generations. Kentucky was not owned by any Indian tribe, and was visited only by wandering war-parties and hunting-parties who came from among the savage nations living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.

A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and killed him, and the others then left Boone and journeyed home; but his brother came out to join him, and the two spent the winter together. Self-reliant, fearless, and possessed of great bodily strength and hardihood, they cared little for the loneliness. The teeming myriads of game furnished abundant food; the herds of shaggy-maned bison and noble-antlered elk, the bands of deer and the numerous black bear, were all ready for the rifle, and they were tame and easily slain. The wolf and the cougar, too, sometimes fell victims to the prowess of the two hunters.

At times they slept in hollow trees, or in some bush lean-to of their own making; at other times, when they feared Indians, they changed their resting-place every night, and after making a fire would go off a mile or two in the woods to sleep. Surrounded by brute and human, foes, they owed their lives to their sleepless vigilance, their keen senses, their eagle eyes, and their resolute hearts.

When the spring came, and the woods were white with the dogwood blossoms, and crimsoned with the red-bud, Boone's brother left him, and Daniel remained for three months alone in the wilderness. The brother soon came back again with a party of hunters; and other parties likewise came in, to wander for months and years through the wilderness; and they wrought huge havoc among the vast herds of game.

In 1771 Boone returned to his home. Two years later he started to lead a party of settlers to the new country; but while passing through the frowning defiles of Cumberland Gap they were attacked by Indians, and driven back--two of Boone's own sons being slain. In 1775, however, he made another attempt; and this attempt was successful. The Indians attacked the newcomers; but by this time the parties of would-be settlers were sufficiently numerous to hold their own. They beat back the Indians, and built rough little hamlets, surrounded by log stockades, at Boonesborough and Harrodsburg; and the permanent settlement of Kentucky had begun.

The next few years were passed by Boone amid unending Indian conflicts. He was a leader among the settlers, both in peace and in war. At one time he represented them in the House of Burgesses of Virginia; at another time he was a member of the first little Kentucky parliament itself; and he became a colonel of the frontier militia. He tilled the land, and he chopped the trees himself; he helped to build the cabins and stockades with his own hands, wielding the long-handled, light-headed frontier ax as skilfully as other frontiersmen. His main business was that of surveyor, for his knowledge of the country, and his ability to travel through it, in spite of the danger from Indians, created much demand for his services among people who wished to lay off tracts of wild land for their own future use. But whatever he did, and wherever he went, he had to be sleeplessly on the lookout for his Indian foes. When he and his fellows tilled the stump-dotted fields of corn, one or more of the party were always on guard, with weapon at the ready, for fear of lurking savages. When he went to the House of Burgesses he carried his long rifle, and traversed roads not a mile of which was free from the danger of Indian attack. The settlements in the early years depended exclusively upon game for their meat, and Boone was the mightiest of all the hunters, so that upon him devolved the task of keeping his people supplied. He killed many buffaloes, and pickled the buffalo beef for use in winter. He killed great numbers of black bear, and made bacon of them, precisely as if they had been hogs. The common game were deer and elk. At that time none of the hunters of Kentucky would waste a shot on anything so small as a prairie-chicken or wild duck; but they sometimes killed geese and swans when they came south in winter and lit on the rivers. But whenever Boone went into the woods after game, he had perpetually to keep watch lest he himself might be hunted in turn. He never lay in wait at a game-lick, save with ears strained to hear the approach of some crawling red foe. He never crept up to a turkey he heard calling, without exercising the utmost care to see that it was not an Indian; for one of the favorite devices of the Indians was to imitate the turkey call, and thus allure within range some inexperienced hunter.

Besides this warfare, which went on in the midst of his usual vocations, Boone frequently took the field on set expeditions against the savages. Once when he and a party of other men were making salt at a lick, they were surprised and carried off by the Indians. The old hunter was a prisoner with them for some months, but finally made his escape and came home through the trackless woods as straight as the wild pigeon flies. He was ever on the watch to ward off the Indian inroads, and to follow the war-parties, and try to rescue the prisoners. Once his own daughter, and two other girls who were with her, were carried off by a band of Indians. Boone raised some friends and followed the trail steadily for two days and a night; then they came to where the Indians had killed a buffalo calf and were camped around it. Firing from a little distance, the whites shot two of the Indians, and, rushing in, rescued the girls. On another occasion, when Boone had gone to visit a salt-lick with his brother, the Indians ambushed them and shot the latter. Boone himself escaped, but the Indians followed him for three miles by the aid of a tracking dog, until Boone turned, shot the dog, and then eluded his pursuers. In company with Simon Kenton and many other noted hunters and wilderness warriors, he once and again took part in expeditions into the Indian country, where they killed the braves and drove off the horses. Twice bands of Indians, accompanied by French, Tory, and British partizans from Detroit, bearing the flag of Great Britain, attacked Boonesborough. In each case Boone and his fellow-settlers beat them off with loss. At the fatal battle of the Blue Licks, in which two hundred of the best riflemen of Kentucky were beaten with terrible slaughter by a great force of Indians from the lakes, Boone commanded the left wing. Leading his men, rifle in hand, he pushed back and overthrew the force against him; but meanwhile the Indians destroyed the right wing and center, and got round in his rear, so that there was nothing left for Boone's men except to flee with all possible speed.

As Kentucky became settled, Boone grew restless and ill at ease. He loved the wilderness; he loved the great forests and the great prairie-like glades, and the life in the little lonely cabin, where from the door he could see the deer come out into the clearing at nightfall. The neighborhood of his own kind made him feel cramped and ill at ease. So he moved ever westward with the frontier; and as Kentucky filled up he crossed the Mississippi and settled on the borders of the prairie country of Missouri, where the Spaniards, who ruled the territory, made him an alcalde, or judge. He lived to a great age, and died out on the border, a backwoods hunter to the last.

PIONEER FARMING

BY MORRIS BIRKBECK (about 1830)

I am now going to take you to the prairies, to show you the very beginning of our settlement. Having fixed on the northwestern portion of our prairie for our future residence and farm, the first act was building a cabin, about two hundred yards from the spot where the house is to stand. This cabin is built of round straight logs, about a foot in diameter, lying upon each other, and notched in at the corners, forming a room eighteen feet long by sixteen; the intervals between the logs "chunked," that is, filled in with slips of wood; and "mudded," that is, daubed with a plaster of mud: a spacious chimney, built also of logs, stands like a bastion at one end: the roof is well covered with four hundred "clap boards" of cleft oak, very much like the pales used in England for fencing parks. A hole is cut through the side, called, very properly, the "door (the through)," for which there is a "shutter," made also of cleft oak, and hung on wooden hinges. All this has been executed by contract, and well executed, for twenty dollars. I have since added ten dollars to the cost, for the luxury of a floor and ceiling of sawn boards, and it is now a comfortable habitation.

We arrived in the evening, our horses heavily laden with our guns, and provisions, and cooking utensils, and blankets, not forgetting the all-important ax. This was immediately put in requisition, and we soon kindled a famous fire, before which we spread our pallets, and, after a hearty supper, soon forgot that besides ourselves, our horses and our dogs, the wild animals of the forest were the only inhabitants of our wide domain. Our cabin stands at the edge of the prairie, just within the wood, so as to be concealed from the view until you are at the very door. Thirty paces to the east the prospect opens from a commanding eminence over the prairie, which extends four miles to the south and southeast, and over the woods beyond to a great distance; whilst the high timber behind, and on each side, to the west, north, and east, forms a sheltered cove about five hundred yards in width. It is about the middle of this cove, two hundred and fifty yards from the wood each way, but open to the south, that we propose building our house.

Well, having thus established myself as a resident proprietor, in the morning my boy and I (our friend having left us) sallied forth in quest of neighbors, having heard of two new settlements at no great distance. Our first visit was to Mr. Emberson, who had just established himself in a cabin similar to our own, at the edge of a small prairie two miles north-west of us. We found him a respectable young man, more farmer than hunter, surrounded by a numerous family, and making the most of a rainy day by mending the shoes of his household. We then proceeded to Mr. Woodland's, about the same distance southwest: he is an inhabitant of longer standing, for he arrived in April, Mr. E. in August. He has since built for us a second cabin, connected with the first by a covered roof or porch, which is very convenient, forming together a commodious dwelling....

There are no very good mill-seats on the streams in our neighborhood, but our prairie affords a most eligible site for a windmill; we are therefore going to erect one immediately: the materials are in great forwardness, and we hope to have it in order to grind the fruits of the ensuing harvest.

Two brothers, and the wife of one of them, started from the village of Puttenham, close to our old Wanborough, and have made their way out to us: they are carpenters, and are now very usefully employed in preparing the scantlings for the mill, and other purposes. You may suppose how cordially we received these good people. They landed at Philadelphia, not knowing where on this vast continent they should find us: from thence they were directed to Pittsburg, a wearisome journey over the mountains of more than 300 miles; at Pittsburgh they bought a little boat for six or seven dollars, and came gently down the Ohio, 1,200 miles, to Shawneetown; from thence they proceeded on foot till they found us....

By the first of March I hope to have two plows at work, and may possibly put in 100 acres of corn this spring. Early in May, I think, we shall be all settled in a convenient temporary dwelling, formed of a range of cabins of ten rooms, until we can accomplish our purpose of building a more substantial house.

KENTUCKY PIONEER LIFE

BY GILBERT IMLAY

_My Dear Friend_,

In some of my first letters I gave you an account of the first settlement of this country. The perturbed state of that period, and the savage state of the country, which was one entire wilderness, made the objects of the first emigrants that of security and sustenance, which produced the scheme of several families living together in what were called Stations.

As the country gained strength the Stations began to break up and their inhabitants to spread themselves and settle upon their estates. But the embarrassment they were in for most of the conveniences of life, did not admit of their building any other houses but those of logs and of opening fields in the most expeditious way for planting the Indian corn; the only grain which was cultivated at that time.

The log house is very soon erected, and in consequence of the friendly disposition which exists among those hospitable people, every neighbor flew to the assistance of each other upon occasions of emergencies.

The next object was to open land to cultivation. The fertility of the soil amply repays the laborer for his toil; for if the large trees are not very numerous, and a large proportion of them sugar maple, it is very likely that from this imperfect cultivation, that the ground will yield from 50 to 60 bushels of corn to the acre. The second crop will be more ample; and as the shade is removed by cutting the timber away, a great part of the land will produce from seventy to one hundred bushels of corn from an acre.

The cattle and hogs will find sufficient food in the woods. The horses want no provender the greater part of the year except cane and wild clover. The garden with little attention, produces him all the culinary roots and vegetables necessary for his table.

In three or four years his flock of cattle and sheep will prove sufficient to supply him with both beef and mutton. By the fourth year, provided he is industrious, he may have his plantation in sufficient good order to build a better house.

Such has been the progress of the settlement of this country, from dirty Stations or forts, that it has expanded into fertile fields, blushing orchards, pleasant gardens, neat and commodious houses, mining villages and trading towns.

A taste for the decorum of the table was soon cultivated; the pleasures of gardening were considered not only as useful but amusing. These improvements in the comforts of living and manners awakened a sense of ambition to instruct their youth in useful and accomplished arts.

The distance from Philadelphia by land is between seven and eight hundred miles, and upwards of five hundred from Richmond. The roads and accommodations are tolerably good to the borders of the wilderness; through which it is hardly possible for a carriage to pass, great part of the way being over high and steep hills, upon the banks of rivers and along defiles which in some places seem to threaten you at every step with danger.

The wilderness which was formerly two hundred miles through without a single habitation, is reduced from the settlement of Powel's Valley to nearly one half that distance; and it is to be expected that in a few years more the remainder of the distance will afford settlements for the accommodation of people traveling that route.

Upon the arrival of emigrants in the country they generally take a view of that part which it is their object to settle in and according to their circumstances fix upon such a situation as may appear eligible for their business. The greater proportion are husbandmen.

(From A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of America, by Gilbert Imlay, New York, 1793.)

A PIONEER BOYHOOD

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WEST IN THE FORTIES

BY JAMES BURTON POND

In the autumn of 1843 I was four years old and living in a log house in the town of Hector, Tompkins (now Schuyler) County, New York. One of my earliest recollections is of a conversation between my father and mother regarding the expected visit of an uncle and his family, who were coming to bid us good-by before moving to Illinois. My uncle had the "Illinois fever"; he had just returned from a "land-looking" in Illinois, where he had preëmpted a new farm. I remember listening to my uncle's glowing description of the new country out in the far West beyond the Great Lakes, where he was going to make a new home. When he had gone my father talked constantly of Illinois, and the neighbors said he had Illinois fever.

We passed the long winter in our log house adjoining my grandfather's farm. All the clothing and bedding people had in those days was home-made, and every household had its loom. In our home, in the single room on the first floor were father's and mother's bed, the trundle-bed, where four of us children slept (lying crosswise), the loom, the spinning-wheel for wool and tow, the flax-wheel, the swifts, reeling-bars, and the quill-wheel, besides the table and chairs. We had two rooms in the attic, one a spare room and the other for the hired help. Frequently during the long evenings my grandmother and other neighbors would come in with their knitting and their tow-cards, and either knit or card tow or heckle flax, talking about Illinois, where my uncle had gone. That mysterious word was unfathomable to me. It was finally decided that we should go there too, and all our furniture, with bedding, spinning-wheels, loom, and crockery, was packed up, and on Monday morning, March 20, 1844, we started for the new country. At Ithaca our goods were put on board a canal-boat, and the next morning I awoke to find myself on Cayuga Lake, in tow of a steamer. For days we traveled slowly on the Erie Canal, with no memorable incidents except an occasional "low bridge," one of which swept our provision-chest nearly the length of the deck.

One evening my uncle, he of the Illinois fever, met us with his horses and farm-wagon. Father hired another team, and we started for my uncle's new home near Libertyville, Lake County, Illinois, where we arrived the following morning. The house was a log hut with one room and an attic. We found my aunt sick with fever and ague. She was wrapped in thick shawls and blankets, sitting by the fireplace, and shaking like a leaf. Before supper was over, mother had a chill and a shake which lasted nearly half the night. The next day it rained hard, and we all had chills, and my father and uncle went to town, two miles, for some medicine. They returned with a large bundle of thoroughwort weed, or boneset, a tea made from which was the order of the day. It was very bitter, and I used to feel more like taking the consequences of the ague than the remedy.

It was too late for father to secure a farm during that first summer in Illinois, and he obtained work in the blacksmith's shop in Libertyville, hiring two rooms for his family in the frame court-house, a half-finished building on a high spot of ground. It was neither plastered nor sided, only rough boards being nailed on the frame, and when it rained and the wind blew we might as well have been out of doors. Here our first summer and winter in Illinois were spent.

As father had a shake every other day, he could work only half the time, and we were very poor. The ague was in the entire family, my sister and I invariably shaking at the same hour every alternate day, and my mother's and father's shakes coming at about the same time. I have known the whole family to shake together; nor did the neighbors escape. There were few comfortable homes and few well people. Boneset tea was a fixture on every stove fireplace. When my morning to shake arrived, I used to lie down on the floor behind the cook-stove and almost hug the old salamander, even on the warmest summer days, my sister on the opposite side, my younger brothers snuggling up close to me, and my mother sitting as near the fire as she could get, all of us with our teeth chattering together.