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Historic Boyhoods

<h2>VII</h2> <h3>Daniel Boone</h3> <h4>The Boy of the Frontier: 1735-1820</h4> Many people were riding to the big red barn that belonged to a Pennsylvania farmer who lived on the outskirts of the little town of Oley in Berks County. It was a Sunday morning early in the summer of 1742, and people from all the neighborhood were heading for that barn. Almost all of them came on horseback, sometimes man and wife riding separate steeds, sometimes the woman seated behind the man, her hands grasping his coat. A few families, father, mother and a flock of children, covered the road on foot, the father with a gun usually strapped across his back. A very few people drove up in primitive carriages, something like old-fashioned English chaises. Those who drove were very proud, because such elegant carriages were rarely seen outside of Philadelphia, and betokened much social prominence. The big doors of the red barn stood wide open, and as soon as the horses were properly tethered the country people streamed inside. Most primitive benches had been placed in rows facing a broad platform at the farther end, and men, women and children filed into the seats with all the solemnity of people entering church. As soon as they had settled themselves on the benches they all stared at the platform. Five swarthy, red-skinned Indians stood on the raised place, and a little in front of them stood a tall, strong-featured white man. The Indians wore their native buckskin clothes, and had chains of bright beads about their necks, but their faces were as quiet and peaceful as that of the white man in front of them. One of them, he who looked the youngest, wore a single brilliant red feather in his long black hair. All the men stood there patiently until the barn was filled. Down in front, close to the platform, sat a small boy, his eyes fixed on the young Indian who wore the scarlet feather. The boy was about eight years old. His hair was dark and rather long, his blue eyes looked from under light yellowish eyebrows, his mouth was very wide but his lips were thin and straight. He looked alert and interested. Presently the white man on the platform, who was a widely-known Moravian missionary named Count Zinzendorf, raised his voice in prayer. The farmers, their wives, and children knelt on the floor of the barn. When the prayer was ended the Count stated that at this meeting, or synod, as he called it, they were to hear from five Delaware Indians, lately converted to Christianity. One after the other the red men stepped forward and spoke, slowly, and sometimes hesitating over long English words, but with a fine earnestness that was accented by their strong, dignified bearing and their firm, well-cut features. The boy in front listened attentively, although he could not understand everything they said. He liked Indians, and, as long as he had to go to church, he was glad he could look at these Delawares. The synod came to an end, and the congregation filed slowly out of the barn. Those who had ridden mounted again, and went their homeward way at the slow and decorous pace suitable to Sunday. Squire Boone, who had been sitting on the front bench with his wife Sarah, and nine of his eleven children, gathered the latter together, and guided them, much like a flock of sheep, to his log cabin home near Oley. One of them, the fourth boy, Daniel by name, had lingered behind. He had waited until the five Delawares were leaving, and then had gone up to the youngest of the Indians, and touched his hand. The Indian looked down at the small boy, and smiled. "How?" he said encouragingly. "Is the feather in your hair a flamingo feather?" asked the boy. The Delaware nodded. "Yes, him flamingo." "How did you win it?" The young man smiled again. "Once the Delawares must have rescue from the Hurons. A chief sent me with others to take word. We must go through Iroquois country to get Hurons. Iroquois bad people, war with us. Other Delawares killed, I take word in safe. Hurons go back with me, and help my people. Chief give me flamingo feather." Admiration shone in the boy's eyes. "I like the Delawares," said he. "Delawares like you people," replied the Indian. "What you name?" "Daniel Boone. Some day, when I grow up, I'll come and visit you." "Good," said the other. He held out his hand as he was used to seeing white men do. The boy put his palm in the Indian's, and they shook hands. Then Daniel turned and scampered down the road after his father. The boys of the Boone family had a very good time. They lived on what was then the frontier between civilization and the wilderness. They learned to hunt and fish, and to know the habits of the animals of the woods and fields. Moreover they were almost as used to seeing Indians as to seeing white people, and had none of the fear of them which kept so many of the settlers farther east continually uneasy. The boys and girls had plenty of work to do. Squire Boone had a big farm, and kept five or six looms working in his house, making homespun clothes for his large family and to sell to his neighbors. He owned a splendid grazing range some little distance north of his home, and sent his cattle there early each spring. Shortly after that Sunday of Count Zinzendorf's missionary meeting Daniel's mother told him that he and she were to take the cattle north to this range, and watch them during the summer. Squire Boone was needed at the farm, the older girls were to tend the loom, and the mother had chosen her favorite son to go north with her. At the beginning of summer they drove the cows to the range, and stayed there with them until autumn. Mrs. Boone and Daniel lived in a small cabin, far from any neighbors. Near the cabin, over a spring, was a dairy-house. The sturdy woman worked here, making fine butter and cheese, while Daniel kept guard over the cattle, letting them wander over the hills and through the woods as they would, but driving them back to their pen near the cabin at sunset. This duty of herdsman left Daniel much time to himself. He spent this time in studying woodcraft. He grew passionately fond of everything belonging to the wilderness; he knew birds and beasts, the trails through the forest and the course of streams as well as any Indian. He set traps of his own making, and brought his captures proudly home at night to his mother. At first he had to make his own weapons, and invented a curious implement, simply a slim, smooth-shaved sapling, with a bunch of twisted roots at the end. This he learned to throw so skilfully that he could readily kill birds, rabbits, and small game with it. A little later, however, his father gave him a rifle, and he became an expert marksman, able to provide his mother with plenty of game for food. It was a wonderful life for a boy who loved the country. All summer he herded the cattle and roamed through the almost untrodden wilderness. In the winter his father let him hunt as soon as he had learned to handle a gun. Daniel roamed far and wide across the Neversink mountain range to the north and west of Monocacy Valley. He kept his family supplied with great stock of game, and he cured the animals' skins. When he had a sufficient store of skins he set out to market them in Philadelphia. The city William Penn had founded on the banks of the Delaware was then a small but prosperous village. It had been designed on the plan of a checker-board, and most of the houses were surrounded by well-kept gardens and flourishing orchards. Primitive as it was, the country boy looked at it with wondering admiration. The houses, which were really very simple, were palaces to him, when he thought of his father's log cabin. The men and women, dressed in the latest importations brought from London by sailing vessels, were figures of surpassing style and elegance. Life in Philadelphia seemed very rich to Daniel Boone; he liked to loiter along the streets and look in at the wide gardens and the comfortable white porches, and he liked to stop and watch a city chaise drive by, with a man in a claret or plum-colored suit and a woman in a bright taffeta gown. They were almost a different race from the buckskin-clad people of the wilderness from whom he came. Yet the frontier was in fact very near to Philadelphia. A few outlying fields about the town alone separated it from the wild forest; guards were ever ready to give warning of danger from Indians on the war-path, and friendly Indians were constantly met with on the streets. There were many fur-traders, too, who brought their goods to market as Daniel did, and one was constantly meeting some rough-clad trapper in from the wilds for a few days of city life. Daniel wandered about slowly, enjoying everything he saw with a boy's delight in the unusual, and finally exchanging the skins he had brought with him for things he needed in his hunting,—long, sharp-edged knives, flints, powder and lead for his gun. When Daniel was fourteen his older brother married a young Quakeress who had received a better education than any of her neighbors. She liked Daniel and began to teach him to read and to figure. He was not a brilliant scholar, but he learned enough to do rough surveying work, and to write letters which expressed what he meant although spelled on a plan of his own. At about the same time Squire Boone started a blacksmith shop, and Daniel added this work to what he already did as herdsman and hunter. The work in iron gave him a chance to plan and carry out new ideas of his in regard to guns and traps. The Pennsylvania country was gradually filling up, and in 1750, when Daniel was fifteen, Squire Boone began to wonder where his eleven children would find farming land. Directly westward rose the Alleghany Mountains, a high barrier to pioneers, and report said that the Indians who lived just beyond them were particularly fierce. Southwest, however, lay alluring valleys, broad meadows between the Appalachian ranges that stretched from Pennsylvania through Virginia and the Carolinas into far-off Georgia. Men who wanted new and bigger lands went south into the Blue Ridge country, and some near neighbors of the Boones had pushed on to the Yadkin Valley which lay in northwestern North Carolina. Reports came back of the splendid lands they found there. Squire Boone was by nature a pioneer, a man who loved to explore new lands and build new settlements, and so he decided to venture into this new and promising country. There is a world of romance in such a journey as this the Boones now undertook, and they were but one of many thousand families who were pushing west and south, laying the foundations of a great land. Mrs. Boone and the younger children were safely stowed away in canvas-covered wagons, such as were later known as "prairie schooners," and Squire Boone with Daniel and the older boys rode horseback, driving the cattle before them, and forming an armed guard about the caravan. They crossed the ford at Harper's Ferry and went on up the rich Shenandoah Valley. At night camp was pitched by a spring and the wagons drawn up in a circle about the cattle. A camp-fire was built and the game which Daniel as huntsman had shot was cooked for supper. Sentries were posted, and all night long father and sons took turns guarding against attack from Indians. Think what a prospect lay before the pioneers! A vast tract of the fairest and richest land in the world waiting to be claimed from the wilderness. They had only to choose and take. But the zeal for exploration led them on, over the table-land of western Virginia, through the primeval forests, up the currents of the many rivers that flow toward the Ohio, and so on to the south and west. As they neared the Yadkin they came to a splendid stretch of land; a high prairie, with fine grass for cattle, and near at hand streams edged with cane-brake. Daniel saw such fish and game as he had never seen before, fruit to be had for the taking, and a cattle range only bounded by the distant western mountains. But as he rode into the splendid prairie he thought more of those distant blue-topped heights than of the near-by meadows; he knew that on and on westward lay a great unknown country and already he felt it call to him to be explored. Squire Boone chose land at a place called Buffalo Lick near the Yadkin River, and built a home there. Daniel now spent little time about the farm, for he had learned the value of skins in the Atlantic cities. Buffalo were plentiful all about the settlement, and he could kill four or five deer in a day. It was in truth a hunter's paradise. In a single day he could kill enough bears to make a ton of what was called bear-bacon; there were numberless wolves, panthers, and wildcats; turkeys, beavers, otters and smaller animals ran wild all about him, and from morn till night he was out hunting in the woods. But life was not all sport for the young Boones. Various Indian tribes, the Catawbas, the Cherokees, and the Shawnese hunted not far away, and although they were often on friendly terms with the whites, and came to the settlement to trade, sometimes they put on their war paint, and descended on the small frontier homes with full fury. As the French came down from the north disputing this new land with the English settlers they made the Indians their allies, and the border warfare grew more bitter. Finally the English general Braddock decided to march west himself and try to teach the French and Indians a lesson. It was not likely that such a sturdy youth as Daniel Boone could resist the desire to march against the French. The expedition promised him a chance to push farther into that wild western country, if nothing else, and so he joined Braddock's small army with about a hundred other North Carolina frontiersmen. Daniel was made chief wagoner and blacksmith. General Braddock knew nothing of Indian warfare, and the little expedition proved an easy target for their enemies. The cumbersome and heavily laden baggage wagons were a great handicap to them. The English regulars, the frontiersmen, and the baggage train were caught in the deep ravine of Turtle Creek, a few miles away from Pittsburg, and suddenly set upon by ambushed Indians commanded by French officers. Many of the drivers, caught in the trap, were killed. Daniel, however, contrived to cut the traces of his team, and mounting one of the horses, escaped down and out of the ravine under a fire of shot and arrows. The Indians pursued the fugitives, laying waste the borders of Pennsylvania and Virginia, but not following as far south as the Yadkin. Daniel reached home, and set to work to strengthen the settlement's ties of friendship with the two tribes of the neighborhood, the Catawbas and the Cherokees. With their aid he was able to provide sufficient safeguard against the Northern tribes. <ANTIMG src="images/illus05.png" alt="daniel" /> Daniel Boone's First View of Kentucky While he was with Braddock's army Daniel had met a man named John Finley, who fired his imagination with stories of his wanderings in the west. He was a fur-trader, and his passion for hunting had already led him into the Kentucky wilderness as far as the Falls of the Ohio River, where Louisville now stands. He had had countless adventures with Indians, with wild animals, and with the perils of stream and forest. Young Boone drank in the stories eagerly, and resolved that some day he would himself go out to explore the west. Daniel had now come to manhood. For a time he stayed in the Yadkin Valley, but the call to follow the trail of the buffaloes and the westward moving Shawnese was clear in his ears. Dangerous days of Indian fighting on the border held him close at home, but the time came when he could resist the call no longer. He left home and took his way through the uncharted hills and forests to Kentucky. At times he fought for his life with roving Indians, and at times he captained some small English garrison beset by the same red men. He won great renown as an Indian fighter, as a hunter, as an intrepid explorer. The little town of Boonesborough was named for him, and he defended it through a long and perilous siege. But so soon as men came and built homes and staked out farms Boone must be moving west. What he sought was the wilderness; he was happiest in the great recesses of the woods, or blazing his own trail across untrodden prairies. He led the vanguard into North Carolina, into West Virginia, into Kentucky, and then into Missouri. He is a splendid example of the man who must go first to prepare the way for others, in every way the best type of those brave, hardy pioneers who were claiming the continent for English-speaking people. The things he had most desired as a boy he most desired in manhood, the rough life of a new country and the struggle to overcome the perils of the wild. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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