BOOKS.
DANIEL BOONE AND THE WILDERNESS ROAD.* THE romance of the pathfinder is always the most lasting in the tradition of a young country. It is a true instinct which turns a boy's mind far more eagerly to wigwams and camp-fires than to Valley Forge and Gettysburg. He wants the elemental mystery, the wide horizon, the unplumbed possibilities which the pioneer with the pack-saddle gains, and which great armies, marching to definite conclusions, sadly lack. There are few better tales of pioneering than that of the Wilderness Road, which led from the Virginian valleys over the Cumber- land highlands to the rich pastures of Kentucky. And history has no more complete instance of the pathfinder than Daniel Boone, who made it. Mr. Addington Bruce in the volume before us tells the story graphically and simply, as it should be told. Our one grievance is that he should not have given us a better map. Half the charm of pioneering lies in the geography, and geography to be worth anything should con- descend to details. There must surely be a better chart of the Wilderness Road than the bald sketch-plan at the end of this book.
Daniel Boone was born in the backwoods of Pennsylvania in the year 1734, the son of one Squire Boone, a settler from Devonshire. When he was sixteen the family moved to the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, where be found himself close on the Indian borders in a fine country for game. He speedily became an adept at woodcraft and an unerring shot;
Dalbui Boons and the Wilderness Road. By H. Addington Brace. London : Macmillan and Co. {6s. 6d. net.] marched with a. local contingent on Braddock's disastrous expedition, and had the good fortune to come back safe. The campaign was the crisis in his life, for on it he met John Finley, who spoke of a wonderland beyond the mountains which the Indians called " Kentucky." The tale fired Boone's imagination, and though he returned home to marry and found a household and to be much harassed by Indian forays, he kept the place at the back of his mind. He made expeditions into Tennessee and as far South as Florida, and then Finley himself suddenly appeared in the Yadkin Valley. Four others were added to the party from the stout Scotch- Irish dwellers in the valley, and in the spring of 1769 the expedition set out. There had been white men in Kentucky before,—La Salle, for example, from the North, and several Virginians, but Boone was the first to go exploring with a view to settlement. They found the country all they had hoped, but their hunting was stopped by a band of Shawnees, who took everything they possessed. Boone refused to go back, set off in pursuit, was again captured, and after many wild adventures escaped. He and his brother settled down in Kentucky to recoup their fortunes, and did not leave till they had thoroughly explored the land and collected enough skins to pay their debts. The incident shows the hard-bitten breed they were,—content to face months of utter loneliness in a country jealously guarded by a crafty and merciless foe.
The pathfinder returned to lead out the first colony. The tough Scotch-Irish frontiersmen of Virginia and the two Carolinas were good stuff for a new country. The intense individualism of their religions faith was reflected in their whole habit of mind. Sturdily independent, self-sufficing, and wise in practical things, they were ready to build cabins and plough their fields before the smoke of an Indian fight was well cleared away. There now appears on the scene an extra- ordinary figure, a North Carolina lawyer named Richard Henderson, who saw in the land beyond the hills a chance of making his fortune and fame. There must have been more in this man than mere mercantile ambition. He had imagination to see the possibilities of the West, and a sense of his own fitness to lead and rule. Unfortunately for him, be did not test the links in his chain, and this early type of " government by chartered company " never got as far as its charter. But he has the honour of being the motive-power of the first settlements, and in a left-handed way is the father of both Kentucky and Tennessee. He began by forming a syndicate and buying the better part of Kentucky from the Cherokee Indians, who were very willing to sell that to which they knew they could give no title. Then he sent for Boone and bade him lead out a colony. So began the Wilderness Road, for while a hunter may travel by a deer-track there must be better provision for women and household goods. The party rendezvoused on the Upper Holston, and from there the road began, going west through Cumberland Gap and then in a northerly direction towards the Kentucky River. Boone's task was no light one, and the expedition had many mis- fortunes. But the leader, as he wrote to Henderson with his own inimitable spelling, was determined " to flusterate the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country, whilst we are in it." At last they reached the site of Boonesborough, and thither Henderson arrived to proclaim a Government and organise the sale of land. The new State of Transylvania was created with a full code of laws and a Representative Assembly. It did not last long. Henderson forgot the pioneer in the land agent. He made his terms too onerous, and the Transylvanians grew tired of him. The war with Britain had broken out, and the Continental Congress refused to recognise the new State. Virginia declined to admit the validity of the purchase from the Cherokees, and in spite of all Henderson's efforts, in 1776 Transylvania was organised as the Kentucky County of the State of Virginia. Henderson failed equally in his attempt in Tennessee. He found State- building a thankless game, but he seems to have acquired a great deal of landed property by his efforts.
With the end of Transylvania began one of the fiercest of frontier wars, during which the new colonists had to fight hard for dear life. Boone was an excellent guide for the road, but he was not a great soldier, and the defence of the colony fell on that hero of backwoods war, George Rogers Clark. Clark saw that the Indian trouble was inspired from the North and North-West, where the British forts in Illinois were a perpetual source of danger. With the instinct- of the leader, he struck straight at the heart of the mischief. The story of the capture of Kaskaskia and Cahokia with a handful of followers is one of the great tales of the American War. Hamilton, the British General, hastened from Detroit to check him, but by a wonderful winter's march through the flooded marshes of the Wabash he surprised Hamilton at Vincennes and sent him prisoner to Virginia. It was a brilliant exploit, though Clark's glory is tarnished by his needless brutality to Hamilton, a fact which Mr. Bruce does not mention. Meanwhile round about Boonesborough there was daily fighting with Shawnees and Cherokees, in which Boone played an active part. He was captured, and so far ingratiated himself with his captors that be was adopted as a brave of the tribe, and shaved and painted in the best Indian fashion. Needless to say, he escaped, and after incredible adventures succeeded in reaching his own people. Boones- borough was long besieged, and Boone was the soul of the defence, as also of the raiding parties who made reprisals. In these wars the women fought as gallantly as the men. Witness the story of 'Mrs. Merril of Nelson County, who killed four Indians with her axe at her cabin door, and smoked one out of her chimney. When the prospect of an Indian stake is before a man be will fight desperately; but nothing is finer than the way in which men and women dauntlessly incurred every form of gratuitous peril to warn or rescue their kinsfolk. The new frontier States had the sternest of baptisms.
With peace the Wilderness Road became a much-travelled route, and immigrants arrived by it daily. At the close of the Revolution there were only ten thousand settlers between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. Ten years later there were more than one hundred thousand, three-fourths of whom were in Kentucky. Very soon the state of the road became a disgrace to a thriving community, and in 1796 the Kentucky Legislature resolved to widen it and make it feasible for waggons. Boone applied for the contract, but did not get it. The pioneer—he was now sixty-two years old— found the country changing too rapidly for his comfort. Kentucky was getting a terribly civilised place, with theatres, and bookshops, and schools, and dry-goods stores. Moreover, he had lost all the land he had once held through having failed to perfect his claims in accordance with the law's requirements. It is always the fate of the pioneer,—he must sow for others to reap. He went back to the Kanawha Valley in West Virginia, but presently he found that it too was filling up. He announced that " he wanted more elbow-room," and made tracks for Missouri. The Spanish authorities at St. Louis welcomed him ; he was given a grant of land, and made Magistrate at Femme Osage. But misfortune still dogged him, for when in 1804 the United States acquired the district, it was found that he had no valid title to his estate. Happily Congress remembered his services, and he was con- firmed in his possession of the Spanish grant. For the rest of his life—he died in 1820 at the age of eighty-six—he spent his days happily, trapping and hunting in the untravelled wilds to the West. Even Missouri was becoming too crowded for his comfort. At the age of eighty-two he was found far away in Nebraska, " in the dress of the roughest, poorest hunter." Mr. Bruce quotes from one of his letters his simple confession of faith :—" I am as ignerant as a Child all the Relegan I have to Love and feer god believe in Jesus Christ Do all the good to my Nighbonrs and my Self that I can and Do as little harm as I can help and trust on god's mercy for the rest and I beleve god never made a man of my prinspel to be Lost." Boone was indeed the finest and richest type of adventurer, "patient, hardy, masterful," and always gentle and humorous, like his great companion in arms, Simon Kenton. He sought all his days for the something lost behind the ranges, and though he left colonies and homes behind him, he still pressed on in the quest. Your pioneer is the true poet who lives his dreams.
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