The Quiet Crisis. Stewart L. Udall
and here, on the far edge of settlement, Daniel learned the survival code of the frontier and acquired from friendly Cherokees a forest prowess that made him at home in wild country the rest of his fife.
While still a young man Daniel went off to war as a wagoner in Braddock’s campaign against the French and Indians, and on returning, he married and carved out a farm of his own, but the urge to have a long look at the undiscovered country got the best of him.
The truth was that Daniel preferred the rifle to the plow, and although word was about that a British Proclamation forbade expansion, the King’s rules didn’t run in the upcountry, and young men with Indian instincts were bound to crave a westward look.
There was the lure of adventure and the chance to test one’s backwoods skills, but there was more than that. At this point in our history, the meaning of the wilderness began to change: the best of the backwoodsmen had mastered Indian woodcraft, and as venturesome hopes dissolved some of the old fears, a new mystique gripped men who lived at the fringe of the frontier. Jefferson sensed it later, and wagered the price of Louisiana on the destiny it held for the American people. It was a mystique known only to men confronted with a virgin continent or an uncharted sea: the undaunted curiosity and quiet fury that led earlier men—Marco Polo, Columbus, Balboa—to take the final chance in their search for the edges of the unknown.
Despite all hazards, men would cross the next river and push through the next gap because certain desires could not be quenched. And so, while young Jefferson formed new ideas about government and the rights of farmers, Daniel Boone left his plow in a half-finished furrow and went into the woods to rediscover an old way of life. Its pleasures were not so cozy as the ones back home, but there were deer and buffalo to kill, and bear to try himself against. There was the dark forest to explore, a game of hide-and-seek with the Shawnees to give a tang to it all, and always the compelling questions: Where does that ridge lead? What lies over the blue hills beyond?
There have been Americans who have had a sixth sense for geography, a map in their heads, and a compass and sextant in their innards. Daniel Boone was one of them, and in 1769 his compass pointed toward Kentucke. He must have fallen in love with the country there, for he wintered over twice and did not return to his family for two years. By the time he came out, he knew more about the bluegrass country than any other white man.
It is hard for us to recreate accurately the life and times of Daniel Boone or to know the Kentucke of his first years. Writing was a skill he lacked, and the autobiography John Filson ghosted for him is two parts Paul Bunyan and one part truth. There were other woodsmen whose achievements at least matched Daniel’s—trail blazers like Ben Logan, Colonel James Knox, Simon Kenton, and Michael Stoner—but, thanks mainly to Filson, it was Boone who became the symbol of them all. The book provides more insight into the folk beliefs of the time than into the state of mind of the real Daniel Boone. Filson’s Kentucke was a halfway house between the Garden of Eden and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The soil was richer, the climate was “more temperate and healthy than other settled parts of America”; there were no marshes or swamps; wild game abounded; livestock could roam untended—and manna from heaven could be had for the asking. Filson’s tales of Boone, like the legend of Paul Bunyan, helped fill his fellow Americans with optimism that made a paradise of any land to the West.
After we won our independence, the making of land-myths became a national pastime. The myth-makers infected our politics and produced the Go West and Manifest Destiny movements. As long as men were convinced that our continent was a succession of pastures of plenty, they would attempt great and foolhardy deeds, and their forward thrust would ultimately move beyond Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.
Filson’s Kentucke was, in reality, a moving magnet—a neck of the woods that moved a little farther west each year, always one step ahead of settlement. We will never know precisely what Boone saw when he peered down into the valleys of Kentucke from his lookout on top of Big Hill, but we know full well that the Filson-Boone autobiography is one of the early manifestations of the Myth of Superabundance that later caused us to squander our natural resources.
About the time Daniel had his first big look, decisions about the future of Kentucke were being made, and the fever of land speculation involved him in the Transylvania Land Company’s scheme to circumvent the King’s Proclamation, preempt an enormous area beyond the mountains, and plant a new colony in the wilderness.
It was early in the spring when Boone set out with a party of twenty-nine along the wilderness road through the Cumberland Gap. Four weeks later, on the twentieth of April, 1775, the first pack train arrived at the site of Boonesborough. This, unknown to the Kentucke colonists, was a moment of national climax, for just twenty-four hours earlier there had been a beginning of another sort on the village green in Lexington, Massachusetts, where a small band of “embattled farmers” put their future in the hands of the minutemen.
Boone, hunter, explorer, and White Indian, was now an agent of progress and a promoter of towns, but this was an episode he would regret. As a result of his service to the Transylvania Company, he eventually acquired claims on 100,000 acres of choice land. Although he lost much of this land when the Transylvania Company collapsed during the Revolution, he temporarily prospered. But Boone was never at home in a world of fences and farms and legal documents, and as a landlord and land speculator he had a bungling way of letting property slip through his hands.
In 1799, Old Daniel called it quits and headed downriver to accept a Missouri land grant tendered the famous Colonel Boone by the Spanish governor. But fate and his own incompetence in the land business stripped the old man even of this grant. Years later the discouraging story was repeated for the last time when Congress awarded him 850 acres for his “arduous and useful services” to his country. Boone sold this land to pay his Kentucke creditors, and he died in 1820, at eighty-five, a landless freeman still in love with the open country.
Filson made him a rustic George Washington, and put a politician’s words in his mouth: Boone considered himself “an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness” and “all his toils and dangers” were made worth while by the prospect of Kentucke becoming “one of the most opulent and powerful states on the continent of North America.”
It is far more likely, however, that another utterance of the old man (recalled years later by a grandson) reveals for us the real Daniel Boone: “I had much rather possess a good fowling piece, with two faithful dogs, and traverse the wilderness with one or two friendly Indian companions, in quest of a hoard of buffaloes or deer, than to possess the best township or to fill the first executive office of the state.”
Boone the town man was a failure. Boone the folk hero existed only in fiction. It was Boone the outdoorsman who left us a lasting legacy. Land-planning eluded him, but Daniel Boone seemed to hold the notion that every man should have a chance to own a piece of property—to farm, to develop, to use. Implicit in his way of life also was the idea that part of the land should be unowned, or rather publicly owned, as a permanent “hunting ground” for all who like the out-of-doors. His idea of happiness included unspoiled country where the land could sing its authentic songs, and where men could hear the call of wild things and know the precious freedom of the wilderness. By the time Boone died, however, his countrymen were already preparing to dismember the wilderness, and to the east both state and federal governments were disposing of their public lands so rapidly that too little land would be preserved where the young men of the future could relive the adventures of Daniel Boone or know the challenge of wide-open spaces.
Others along the wide Missouri and down the Mississippi knew what Boone meant. One, Mark Twain, would later write a nostalgic story of our early Eden. Huck Finn is a portrait of the American close to the frontier and the wilderness—careless, free of restraints, with none of the unimportant virtues and all of the essential ones. He does not plow or plant or build; he accepts his world with an Indian’s casualness and with now and then an Indian’s respect. When, at the end, he has a choice of alternatives—to be “civilized” and learn to live up to his newly discovered moral sense, or to stay with nature and to head for the Territories—he picks the latter as the better choice.
The trail of the White Indians did not end with Daniel Boone’s burial beside the Missouri. Just a few