Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground. Constance Lindsay Skinner
time the Quakers were oppressed, and George Boone therefore sought information of William Penn, his coreligionist, regarding the colony which Penn had established in America. In 1712 he sent his three elder children, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out the land. Sarah and Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while their brother returned to England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, George Boone, his wife, and the rest of his children journeyed to Bristol and sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on the 10th of October. The Boones went first to Abingdon, the Quaker farmers' community. Later they moved to the northwestern frontier hamlet of North Wales, a Welsh community which, a few years previously, had turned Quaker. Sarah Boone married a German named Jacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township, Berks County. In 1718 George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley, or, to be exact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and there he lived in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren, seventy descendants in all—English, German, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish blended into one family of Americans. ¹
¹ R. G. Thwaites, Daniel Boone, p. 5.
Among the Welsh Quakers was a family of Morgans. In 1720 Squire Boone married Sarah Morgan. Ten years later he obtained 250 acres in Oley on Owatin Creek, eight miles southeast of the present city of Reading; and here, in 1734, Daniel Boone was born, the fourth son and sixth child of Squire and Sarah Morgan Boone. Daniel Boone therefore was a son of the frontier. In his childhood he became familiar with hunters and with Indians, for even the red men came often in friendly fashion to his grandfather's house. Squire Boone enlarged his farm by thrift. He continued at his trade of weaving and kept five or six looms going, making homespun cloth for the market and his neighbors.
Daniel's father owned grazing grounds several miles north of the homestead and each season he sent his stock to the range. Sarah Boone and her little Daniel drove the cows. From early spring till late autumn, mother and son lived in a rustic cabin alone on the frontier. A rude dairy house stood over a cool spring, and here Sarah Boone made her butter and cheese. Daniel, aged ten at this time, watched the herds; at sunset he drove them to the cabin for milking, and locked them in the cowpens at night.
He was not allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself a weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shaved sapling with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert was he in the launching of this primitive spear that he easily brought down birds and small game. When he reached his twelfth year, his father bought him a rifle; and he soon became a crack shot. A year later we find him setting off on the autumn hunt—after driving the cattle in for the winter—with all the keenness and courage of a man twice his thirteen years. His rifle enabled him to return with meat for the family and skins to be traded in Philadelphia. When he was fourteen his brother Sam married Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who took a special interest in her young brother-in-law and taught him “the rudiments of three R's.”
The Boones were prosperous and happy in Oley and it may be wondered why they left their farms and their looms, both of which were profitable, and set their faces towards the Unknown. It is recorded that, though the Boones were Quakers, they were of a high mettle and were not infrequently dealt with by the Meeting. Two of Squire Boone's children married “worldlings”—non-Quakers—and were in consequence “disowned” by the Society. In defiance of his sect, which strove to make him sever all connection with his unruly offspring, Squire Boone refused to shut his doors on the son and the daughter who had scandalized local Quakerdom. The Society of Friends thereupon expelled him. This occurred apparently during the winter of 1748-49. In the spring of 1750 we see the whole Boone family (save two sons) with their wives and children, their household goods and their stock, on the great highway, bound for a land where the hot heart and the belligerent spirit shall not be held amiss.
Southward through the Shenandoah goes the Boone caravan. The women and children usually sit in the wagons. The men march ahead or alongside, keeping a keen eye open for Indian or other enemy in the wild, their rifles under arm or over the shoulder. Squire Boone, who has done with Quakerdom and is leading all that he holds dear out to larger horizons, is ahead of the line, as we picture him, ready to meet first whatever danger may assail his tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small stature, with ruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in the line, together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded cattle and companioned each other through long months in the cabin on the frontier. We do not think of this woman as riding in the wagon, though she may have done so, but prefer to picture her, with her tall robust body, her black hair, and her black eyes—with the s udden Welsh snap in them—walking as sturdily as any of her sons.
If Daniel be beside her, what does she see when she looks at him? A lad well set up but not overtall for his sixteen years, perhaps—for “eye-witnesses” differ in their estimates of Daniel Boone's height—or possibly taller than he looks, because his figure has the forest hunter's natural slant forward and the droop of the neck of one who must watch his path sometimes in order to tread silently. It is Squire Boone's blood which shows in his ruddy face—which would be fair but for its tan—and in the English cut of feature, the straw-colored eyebrows, and the blue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his shoulders. We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by this plunge into the Wild. He sees ahead—the days of his great explorations and warfare, the discovery of Kentucky? Not at all. This is a boy of sixteen in love with his rifle. He looks ahead to vistas of forest filled with deer and to skies clouded with flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is happiness enough for Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later life, he asked little, if any more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.
CHAPTER II.
Folkways
These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark the first great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus the beginnings of the westward movement disclose to us a feature characteristic also of the later migrations which flung the frontier over the Appalachians, across the Mississippi, and finally to the shores of the Pacific. The pioneers, instead of moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the wilderness as they went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves beyond, out of contact with the life they had left behind. Thus separated by hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more civilized communities, the conquerors of the first American “West,” prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding “Wests,” inevitably struck out their own ways of life and developed their own customs. It would be difficult, indeed, to find anywhere a more remarkable contrast in contemporary folkways than that presented by the two great community groups of the South—the inland or piedmont settlements, called the Back Country, and the lowland towns and plantations along the seaboard.
The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon to prove, was not less independent in its ideals than the frontier society of the Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone and feeling. Its leaders were the landed gentry—men of elegance, and not far behind their European contemporaries in the culture of the day. They were rich, without effort, both from their plantations, where black slaves and indentured servants labored, and from their coastwise and overseas trade. Their battles with forest and red man were long past. They had leisure for diversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing of thoroughbred horses, the dance, high play with dice and card, cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier. Law and politics drew their soberer minds.
Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneers in the first American “West.” There every jewel of promise was ringed round with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had purchased at a nominal price, or the free land he had taken by “tomahawk claim”—that is by cutting his name into the bark of a deadened tree, usually beside a spring—supported a forest of tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The long grass and weeds which covered the ground in a wealth of natural pasturage harbored the