CAMP LIFE BEYOND THE ALLEGHANIES

John Finley and his Adventures. ­Aspect of the Country. ­Boone’s Private Character. ­His Love for the Wilderness. ­First view of Kentucky. ­Emigrants’ Dress. ­Hunter’s Home. ­Capture of Boone and Stewart by the Indians. ­Their Escape. ­Singular Incident.

In the year 1767, a bold hunter by the name of John Finley with two or three companions crossed the mountain range of the Alleghanies into the region beyond, now known as Kentucky.  The mountains where he crossed, consisting of a series of parallel ridges, some of which were quite impassable save at particular points, presented a rugged expanse nearly fifty miles in breadth.  It took many weary days for these moccassined feet to traverse the wild solitudes.  The Indian avoids the mountains.  He chooses the smooth prairie where the buffalo and the elk graze, and where the wild turkey, the grouse and the prairie chicken, wing their flight, or the banks of some placid stream over which he can glide in his birch canoe, and where fish of every variety can be taken.  Indeed the Indians, with an eye for picturesque beauty, seldom reared their villages in the forest, whose glooms repelled them.  Generally where the forest approached the stream, they clustered their wigwams in its edge, with the tranquil river and the open country spread out before them.

John Finley and his companions traversed the broad expanse of the Alleghanies, without meeting any signs of human life.  The extreme western ridge of these parallel éminences or spurs, has received the name of the Cumberland mountains.  Passing through a gorge, which has since then become renowned in peace and war as Cumberland Gap, they entered upon a vast undulating expanse, of wonderful fertility and beauty.  In its rivers, its plains, its forests, its gentle éminences, its bright skies and salubrious clime, it presented then, as now, as attractive a residence for man as this globe can furnish.  Finley and his companions spent several months roving through this, to them, new Eden.  Game of every variety abounded.  Through some inexplicable reason, no Indians held possession of the country.  But wandering tribes, whose homes and acknowledged territory were far away in the north, the west, and the south, were ever traversing these regions in hunting bands.  They often met in bloody encounters.  These conflicts were so frequent and so sanguinary, that this realm so highly favored of God for the promotion of all happiness, subsequently received the appropriate name of “The dark and bloody ground.”

After an absence of many months, Finley and his companions returned to North Carolina, with the most glowing accounts of the new country which they had found.  Their story of the beauty of those realms was so extravagant, that many regarded them as gross exaggerations.  It subsequently appeared, however, that they were essentially true.  A more lovely and attractive region cannot be found on earth.  It is man’s inhumanity to man, mainly, which has ever caused such countless millions to mourn.

Daniel Boone listened eagerly to the recital of John Finley and his associates.  The story they told added fuel to the flame of emigration, which was already consuming him.  He talked more and more earnestly of his desire to cross the mountains.  We know not what were the emotions with which his wife was agitated, in view of her husband’s increasing desire for another plunge into the wilderness.  We simply know that through her whole career, she manifested the most tender solicitude to accommodate herself to the wishes of her beloved husband.  Indeed he was a man peculiarly calculated to win a noble woman’s love.  Gentle in his demeanor, and in all his utterances, mild and affectionate in his intercourse with his family, he seemed quite unconscious of the heroism he manifested in those achievements, which gave him ever increasing renown.

Life in the cabin of the frontiersman, where the wants are few, and the supplies abundant, is comparatively a leisure life.  These men knew but little of the hurry and the bustle with which those in the crowded city engage daily in the almost deadly struggle for bread.  There was no want in the cabin of Daniel Boone.  As these two hardy adventurers, John Finley and Daniel Boone, sat together hour after hour by the fire, talking of the new country which Finley had explored, the hearts of both burned within them again to penetrate those remote realms.  To them there were no hardships in the journey.  At the close of each day’s march, which but slightly wearied their toughened sinews, they could in a few moments throw up a shelter, beneath which they would enjoy more luxurious sleep than the traveler, after being rocked in the rail-cars, can now find on the softest couches of our metropolitan hotels.  And the dainty morsel cut with artistic skill from the fat buffalo, and toasted on the end of a ramrod before the camp-fire, possessed a relish which few epicures have ever experienced at the most sumptuous tables in Paris or New York.  And as these men seem to have been constitutionally devoid of any emotions of fear from wild beasts, or still wilder Indians, the idea of a journey of a few hundred miles in the wilderness was not one to be regarded by them with any special solicitude.

Gradually they formed a plan for organizing a small party to traverse these beautiful realms in search of a new home.  A company of six picked men was formed, and Daniel Boone was chosen their leader.  The names of this party were John Finley, John Stewart, Joseph Holden, James Moncey, and William Cool.  A journey of many hundred miles was before them.  Through the vast mountain barrier, which could only be traversed by circuitous wanderings some hundreds of miles in extent, their route was utterly pathless, and there were many broad and rapid streams to be crossed, which flowed through the valleys between the mountain ridges.  Though provision in abundance was scattered along the way, strong clothing must be provided, powder and bullets they must take with them, and all these necessaries were to be carried upon their backs, for no pack horses could thread the defiles of the mountains or climb their rugged cliffs.  It was also necessary to make provision for the support of the families of these adventurers during their absence of many months.  It does not appear that Mrs. Boone presented any obstacle in the way of her husband’s embarking in this adventure.  Her sons were old enough to assist her in the management of the farm, and game was still to be found in profusion in the silent prairies and sublime forests which surrounded them.

In the sunny clime of North Carolina May comes with all the balminess and soft zéphyrs of a more northern summer.  It was a beautiful morning on the first day of May, 1769, when Boone and his companions commenced their adventurous journey.  In the brief narrative which Boone has given of this excursion, we perceive that it was with some considerable regret that he separated himself from his much loved wife and children on the peaceful banks of the Yadkin.

We must infer that the first part of their journey was fatiguing, for it took them a full month to accomplish the passage of the mountains.  Though it was less than a hundred miles across these ridges in a direct line, the circuitous route which it was necessary to take greatly lengthened the distance.  And as they were never in a hurry, they would be very likely, when coming to one of the many lovely valleys on the banks of the Holstein, or the Clinch river, to be enticed to some days of delay.  Where now there are thriving villages filled with the hum of the industries of a high civilization, there was then but the solitary landscape dotted with herds of buffalo and of deer.

Boone says that in many of these regions he found buffalo roving in companies of several hundreds feeding upon the tender leaves of the canebrake, or browsing upon the smooth and extended meadows.  Being far removed from the usual route of the Indian hunters, they were very tame, manifesting no fear at the approach of man.

On the seventh of June, our adventurers, at the close of a day of arduous travel, reached an eminence of the Cumberland Mountains, which gave them a commanding and an almost entrancing view of the region beyond, now known as the State of Kentucky.  At the height upon which they stood, the expanse spreading out to the West, until lost in the distant horizon, presented an aspect of nature’s loveliness such as few eyes have ever beheld.  The sun was brilliantly sinking, accompanied by a gorgeous retinue of clouds.  Majestic forests, wide-spread prairies, and lakes and rivers, gilded by the setting sun, confirmed the truth of the most glowing reports which had been heard from the lips of Finley.  An artist has seized upon this incident, which he has transferred to canvass, in a picture which he has entitled, “Daniel Boone’s first view of Kentucky.”  Engravings have been so multiplied of this painting, that it has become familiar to most eyes.

The appearance of our adventurers is thus graphically described by Mr. Peck, in his excellent Life of Daniel Boone.

“Their dress was of the description usually worn at that period by all forest-rangers.  The outside garment was a hunting shirt, or loose open frock, made of dressed deer-skins.  Leggins, or drawers, of the same material, covered the lower extremities, to which was appended a pair of moccasins for the feet.  The cape or collar of the hunting shirt, and the seams of the leggins were adorned with fringes.  The undergarments were of coarse cotton.  A leather belt encircled the body.  On the right side was suspended the tomahawk, to be used as a hatchet.  On the left was the hunting-knife, powder-horn, bullet-pouch, and other appendages indispensable for a hunter.  Each person bore his trusty rifle, and as the party made its toilsome way amid the shrubs, and over the logs and loose shrubs, that accident had thrown upon the obscure trail they were following, each man gave a sharp lookout, as though danger, or a lurking enemy were near.  Their garments were soiled and rent; the unavoidable result of long travel and exposure to the heavy rains which had fallen, the weather having been stormy and uncomfortable, and they had traversed a mountainous wilderness for several hundred miles.  The leader of the party was of full size, with a hardy, robust, sinewy frame, and keen piercing hazel eyes, that glanced with quickness at every object as they passed on, now cast forward in the direction they were travelling, for signs of an old trail, and in the next moment directed askance into the dense forest or the deep ravine, as if watching some concealed enemy.  The reader will recognise in this man, the pioneer Boone at the head of his companions.”

The peculiar character of these men is developed in the fact, that, rapidly descending the western declivity of the mountains, they came to a beautiful meadow upon the banks of a little stream now called Red River.  Here they reared their hut, and here they remained in apparently luxurious idleness all the summer; and here Daniel Boone remained all of the ensuing winter.  Their object could scarcely have been to obtain furs, for they could not transport them across the mountains.  There were in the vicinity quite a number of salt springs which the animals of the forest frequented in immense numbers.  In the brief account which Boone gives of these long months, he simply says: 

“In this forest, the habitation of beasts of every kind natural to America, we practised hunting with great success until the twenty-second day of December following.”

Bears, buffalo and deer were mainly the large game which fell before their rifles.  Water-fowl, and also land birds of almost every variety, were found in great profusion.  It must have been a strange life which these six men experienced during these seven months in the camp on the silent waters of the Red River.  No Indians were seen, and no traces of them were discovered through this period.  The hunters made several long excursions in various directions, apparently examining the country in reference to their own final settlement in it, and to the introduction of emigrants from the Atlantic border.  Indeed it has been said that Daniel Boone was the secret agent of a company on the other side of the mountains, who wished to obtain possession of a large extent of territory for the formation of a colony there.  But of this nothing with certainty is known.  Yet there must have been some strong controlling motive to have induced these men to remain so long in their camp, which consisted simply of a shed of logs, on the banks of this solitary stream.

Three sides of the hut were enclosed.  The interstices between the logs were filled with moss or clay.  The roof was also carefully covered with bark, so as to be impervious to rain.  The floor was spread over with dry leaves and with the fragrant twigs of the hemlock, presenting a very inviting couch for the repose of weary men.  The skins of buffaloes and of bears presented ample covering for their night’s repose.  The front of the hut, facing the south, was entirely open, before which blazed their camp-fire.  Here the men seem to have been very happy.  The climate was mild; they were friendly to each other; they had good health and abundance of food was found in their camp.

On the twenty-second of December, Boone, with one of his companions, John Stewart, set out on one of their exploring tours.  There were parts of the country called cane-brakes, covered with cane growing so thickly together as to be quite impenetrable to the hunter.  Through portions of these the buffaloes had trampled their way in large companies, one following another, opening paths called streets.  These streets had apparently been trodden for ages.  Following these paths, Boone and his companion had advanced several miles from their camp, when suddenly a large party of Indians sprang from their concealment and seized them both as captives.  The action was so sudden that there was no possibility of resistance.  In the following words Boone describes this event: 

“This day John Stewart and I had a pleasing ramble, but fortune changed the scene in the close of it.  We had passed through a great forest, on which stood myriads of trees, some gay with blossoms, others rich with fruits.  Nature was here a series of wonders and a fund of delight.  Here she displayed her ingenuity and industry in a variety of flowers and fruits, beautifully colored, elegantly shaped, and charmingly flavored; and we were diverted with innumerable animals presenting themselves perpetually to our view.

“In the decline of the day, near Kentucky river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out upon us from a thick canebrake and made us prisoners.  The time of our sorrow was now arrived.  They plundered us of what we had, and kept us in confinement seven days, treating us with common savage usage.”

The peculiar character of Boone was here remarkably developed.  His whole course of life had made him familiar with the manners and customs of the Indians.  They were armed only with bows and arrows.  He had the death-dealing rifle which they knew not how to use.  His placid temper was never ruffled by elation in prosperity or despair in adversity.  He assumed perfect contentment with his lot, cultivated friendly relations with them, taught them many things they did not know, and aided them in all the ways in his power.  His rifle ball would instantly strike down the buffalo, when the arrow of the Indian would only goad him to frantic flight.

The Indians admired the courage of their captive, appreciated his skill, and began to regard him as a friend and a helper.  They relaxed their vigilance, while every day they were leading their prisoners far away from their camp into the boundless West.  Boone was so well acquainted with the Indian character as to be well aware that any attempt to escape, if unsuccessful, would cause his immediate death.  The Indians, exasperated by what they would deem such an insult to their hospitality, would immediately bury the tomahawk in his brain.  Thus seven days and nights passed away.

At the close of each day’s travel the Indians selected some attractive spot for the night’s encampment or bivouac, according to the state of the weather, near some spring or stream.  Here they built a rousing fire, roasted choice cuts from the game they had taken, and feasted abundantly with jokes and laughter, and many boastful stories of their achievements.  They then threw themselves upon the ground for sleep, though some one was appointed to keep a watch over their captives.  But deceived by the entire contentment and friendliness, feigned by Boone, and by Stewart who implicitly followed the counsel of his leader’s superior mind, all thoughts of any attempt of their captives to escape soon ceased to influence the savages.

On the seventh night after the capture, the Indians, gorged with an abundant feast, were all soundly asleep.  It was midnight.  The flickering fire burned feebly.  The night was dark.  They were in the midst of an apparently boundless forest.  The favorable hour for an attempt to escape had come.  But it was full of peril.  Failure was certain death, for the Indians deemed it one of the greatest of all crimes for a captive who had been treated with kindness to attempt to escape.  A group of fierce savages were sleeping around, each one of whom accustomed to midnight alarms, was supposed to sleep, to use an expressive phrase, “with one eye open.”  Boone, who had feigned sound slumber, cautiously awoke his companion who was asleep and motioned him to follow.  The rustling of a leaf, the crackling of a twig, would instantly cause every savage to grasp his bow and arrow and spring from the ground.  Fortunately the Indians had allowed their captives to retain their guns, which had proved so valuable in obtaining game.

With step as light as the fall of a feather these men with moccasined feet crept from the encampment.  After a few moments of intense solicitude, they found themselves in the impenetrable gloom of the forest, and their captors still undisturbed.  With vastly superior native powers to the Indian, and equally accustomed to forest life, Boone was in all respects their superior.  With the instinct of the bee, he made a straight line towards the encampment they had left, with the locality of which the Indians were not acquainted.  The peril which menaced them added wings to their flight.  It was mid-winter, and though not very cold in that climate, fortunately for them, the December nights were long.

Six precious hours would pass before the dawn of the morning would struggle through the tree-tops.  Till then the bewildered Indians could obtain no clue whatever to the direction of their flight.  Carefully guarding against leaving any traces of their footsteps behind them, and watching with an eagle eye lest they should encounter any other band of savages, they pressed forward hour after hour with sinews apparently as tireless as if they had been wrought of iron.  When the fugitives reached their camp they found it plundered and deserted.  Whether the red men had discovered it and carried off their companions as prisoners, or whether the white men in a panic had destroyed what they could not remove and had attempted a retreat to the settlements, was never known.  It is probable that in some way they perished in the wilderness, and that their fate is to be added to the thousands of tragedies occurring in this world which no pen has recorded.

The intrepid Boone and his companion Stewart seemed, however, to have no idea of abandoning their encampment.  But apprehensive that the Indians might have discovered their retreat, they reared a small hut in another spot, still more secret and secure.  It is difficult to imagine what motive could have led these two men to remain any longer in these solitudes, five hundred miles from home, exposed to so many privations and to such fearful peril.  Notwithstanding the utmost care in husbanding their resources, their powder and lead were rapidly disappearing, and there was no more to be obtained in the wilderness.  But here they remained a month, doing apparently nothing, but living luxuriously, according to their ideas of good cheer.  The explanation is probably to be found in the fascination of this life of a hunter, which once enjoyed, seems almost irresistible, even to those accustomed to all the appliances of a high civilization.

A gentleman from New York, who spent a winter among the wild scenes of the Rocky Mountains, describes in the following graphic language, the effect of these scenes upon his own mind: 

“When I turned my horse’s head from Pikes Peak, I quite regretted the abandonment of my mountain life, solitary as it was, and more than once thought of again taking the trail to the Salado Valley, where I enjoyed such good sport.  Apart from the feeling of loneliness, which anyone in my situation must naturally have experienced, surrounded by the stupendous works of nature, which in all their solitary grandeur frowned upon me, there was something inexpressibly exhilarating in the sensation of positive freedom from all worldly care, and a consequent expansion of the sinews, as it were, of mind and body, which made me feel elastic as a ball of india-rubber, and in such a state of perfect ease, that no more dread of scalping Indians entered my mind, than if I had been sitting in Broadway, in one of the windows of the Astor House.

“A citizen of the world, I never found any difficulty in investing my resting place wherever it might be, with the attributes of a home.  Although liable to the accusation of barbarism, I must confess that the very happiest moments of my life have been spent in the wilderness of the Far West.  I never recall but with pleasure the remembrance of my solitary camp in the Bayou Salado, with no friend near me more faithful than my rifle.  With a plentiful supply of dry pine logs on the fire, and its cheerful blaze streaming far up into the sky, illuminating the valley far and near, I would sit enjoying the genial warmth, and watch the blue smoke as it curled upward, building castles in its vapory wreaths.  Scarcely did I ever wish to change such hours of freedom for all the luxuries of civilized life; and, unnatural and extraordinary as it may appear, yet such are the fascinations of the life of the mountain hunter, that I believe that not one instance could be adduced of even the most polished and civilized of men, who had once tasted the sweets of its attendant liberty, and freedom from every worldly care, not regretting to exchange them for the monotonous life of the settlements, and not sighing and sighing again for its pleasures and allurements.

“A hunter’s camp in the Rocky Mountains, is quite a picture.  It is invariably made in a picturesque locality, for, like the Indian, the white hunter has an eye to the beautiful.  Nothing can be more social and cheering than the welcome blaze of the camp-fire on a cold winter’s night, and nothing more amusing or entertaining, if not instructive, than the rough conversation of the simple-minded mountaineers, whose nearly daily task is all of exciting adventure, since their whole existence is spent in scenes of peril and privation.  Consequently the narration is a tale of thrilling accidents, and hair-breadth escapes, which, though simple matter-of-fact to them, appears a startling romance to those unacquainted with the lives led by those men, who, with the sky for a roof, and their rifles to supply them with food and clothing, call no man lord or master, and are as free as the game they follow.”

There are many events which occurred in the lives of Boone and his companions, which would seem absolutely incredible were they not sustained by evidence beyond dispute.  Boone and Stewart were in a boundless, pathless, wilderness of forests, mountains, rivers and lakes.  Their camp could not be reached from the settlements, but by a journey of many weeks, apparently without the smallest clue to its location.  And yet the younger brother of Boone, upon whom had been conferred his father’s singular baptismal name of Squire, set out with a companion to cross the mountains, in search of Daniel.  One day in the latter part of January, Boone and Stewart were quite alarmed in seeing two men approach their camp.  They supposed of course that they were Indians, and that they were probably followed by a numerous band.  Escape was impossible.  Captivity and death seemed certain.  But to their surprise and delight, the two strangers proved to be white men; one the brother of Daniel Boone, and the other a North Carolinian who had accompanied him.  They brought with them quite a supply of powder and lead; inestimable treasures in the remote wilderness.  Daniel, in his Autobiography, in the following simple strain, alludes to this extraordinary occurrence: 

“About this time my brother Squire Boone, with another adventurer, who came to explore the country shortly after us, was wandering through the forest, determined to find me if possible, and accidentally found our camp.  Notwithstanding the unfortunate circumstances of our company, and our dangerous situation as surrounded by hostile savages, our meeting so fortunately in the wilderness made us reciprocally sensible of the utmost satisfaction.  So much does friendship triumph over misfortune, that sorrows and sufferings vanish at the meeting, not only of real friends, but of the most distant acquaintances, and substitute happiness in their room.”

Our hardy pioneer, far more familiar with his rifle than his pen, comments as follows on their condition: 

“We were in a helpless, dangerous situation; exposed daily to perils and death, among savages and wild beasts.  Not a white man in the country but ourselves.  Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families, in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced.  I often observed to my brother, ’You see how little nature requires to be satisfied.  Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts, than in the enjoyment of external things; and I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is.  This consists in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briers and thorns.’”