Whitetail Hunting photo
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In the spring of 1769, six hunters rode west from the upper yadkin valley in north carolina, bound for a country beyond the mountains that they called kan-ta-ke. they wore wide-brimmed felt hats, long homespun shirts, buckskin leggings over linen breeches, and moccasins. each man cradled a pennsylvania long rifle and had a powder horn and bullet pouch hanging from his shoulder, plus a sheathed hunting knife and a tomahawk tucked in his belt. their packhorses carried traps, camp kettles, smithing tools, and extra rifles, powder, shot, and flints.

The men expected to be gone at least six months, and their leader, a 34-year-old whose wilderness exploits were already legendary, hoped to be gone longer. In fact, it would be two years before Daniel Boone again laid eyes on his wife Rebecca and their six children. Rebecca was pregnant with their seventh child, but she had learned long ago to take her husband’s absences in stride. For Boone was a “long hunter” who routinely left his family for months at a stretch to harvest skins and pelts for the market.

An Indian Game Preserve

This was not Boone’s first long hunt-he had been a professional hunter since age 16-but it was his first venture into Kentucky, a vast Indian game preserve shared by the Cherokees to the south and the Shawnees to the north on the Ohio. The Indians hunted in Kentucky but did not live there. Nor, right then, did whites.

Riding with Boone as they crossed into what is now eastern Tennessee, and through a cut in the mountains called the Cumberland Gap, were his brother-in-law John Stewart, a frontier trader named John Findley, and three others. Boone had known Findley since 1755, when they had served together in the French and Indian War. Three years before that, Findley had penetrated Kentucky’s interior, and his tales of that venture had filled Boone’s head with visions of a country teeming with game.

So years later, when the trader showed up in the Yadkin settlements, the talk inevitably turned to this land of near-mythic bounty. Findley told Boone he knew a way to reach Kentucky directly from the Appalachians, and the six long hunters headed for the Cumberland Gap, where they picked up a trail known to the Cherokees as the Warrior’s Path and followed it north.

Deer, Elk and Buffalo

Five weeks after leaving the Yadkin, Boone climbed a hill called Pilot Knob and surveyed an endless rolling landscape. The hardwood forests and dense canebrakes were laced with buffalo trails, or “traces”-wide swaths that would later serve as pioneer roads. The traces led to “licks”-bubbling mineral springs that drew buffalo by the thousands. In other places the forest opened up to bluegrass meadows grazed by herds of elk and deer.

Having reached the hunting grounds, the party set up base camp-a simple lean-to, fire pit, and scaffolding to keep dressed hides and meat away from predators-and fell into a routine that would carry them through the summer and fall. Two men would remain in camp dressing skins and jerking meat while the others paired off and went looking for game. Boone and Stewart generally worked together and might stay out for a week or more.

Mainly they hunted deer, for a dressed buckskin would fetch the equivalent of a German silver coin called a thaler (eventually, buck became synonymous with dollar). Less valuable elk skins were cut into “tugs,” or ropes for use in camp, and the undressed hides of bear and buffalo were used for bedding and to wrap the bales of dressed deer skins. In winter, when beaver pelts were prime, they switched to trapping.

Boone and his five companions were the first long hunters to reach Kentucky via the Cumberland Gap, but it wasn’t long before others arrived.

Boone the Young Hunter

Boone’s forebears were English and Welsh Quakers who first settled near what became Rding, Pennsylvania, where Daniel was born in 1734, the rambunctious fourth boy and sixth child (of 11) of Squire and Sarah Boone. As a child tending the family cows he sharpened the end of his herdsman’s staff and used it to spear small game. By age 13 he was ranging farther afield, hunting opossums and raccoons with his first gun, a short smoothbore piece. By the time his family moved on to western Virginia and then to North Carolina, he had acquired his first long rifle and was soon winning shooting matches against men twice his age, even-as a self-imposed handicap-when shooting one-armed.

Boone was blessed with keen intelligence, great eyesight and reflexes, and the instincts of a born hunter, but as a boy he picked up most of his basic knowledge about tracking, stalking, and decoying from the Delaware and Shawnee Indians who gathered at his grandfather’s mill.

By today’s standards, the tactics adopted by European Americans from the Indians would be considered illegal or at best, unethical; but these were frontiersmen, with no concept of conservation, simply a need to get game. Jacklighting-using a torch to find and then freeze deer in their tracks-was one popular method. So was encircling deer in a ring of flames and shooting them as they bolted in panic. Boone did some “fire hunting” as a boy but disapproved of it as a man. It was too easy and required a companion. He preferred still-hunting alone; it challenged his woodcraft.

No Life on the Farm

Because the men who hunted for a living did most of their work at dawn and dusk and the rising of the moon, they might or might not put in much time behind a plow. Long hunters were especially loath to do farm chores. Boone, who was described by a nephew as “ever impractical of the business of farming,” gave it up at the earliest opportunity. Appalled at this apparent bias against honest work, colonial gentry and clergy concluded that backwoods hunters “delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish Life, and seem not desirous of changing it.”

Such critics, of course, overlooked the long hunter’s ability to survive by his wits in a wilderness where injury and hostile Indians were constant threats. Nor did they acknowledge his self-sufficiency and practical know-how. A long hunter made his own clothes and accoutrements and repaired his rifle with parts he forged himself. He cast his own bullets and mixed his own black powder. The long hunter’s understanding of the animals he hunted and the wild plants he foraged for food and medicine enabled him to live nearly indefinitely off the land.

Raids and Attacks

Seven months into Boone’s long hunt in Kentucky, Shawnees got the drop on his party and relieved it of a season’s worth of skins and furs. Every long hunter lived with this risk: From the Indians’ point of view, the whites were poachers and their goods could be considered contraband. The Shawnees might have killed Boone and his companions on the spot, but their leader let the white hunters go with a warning: Come here again, and “you may be sure the wasps and yellow-jackets will sting you severely.”

The Shawnees also took the hunters’ horses and long rifles but left them with some cheap trade guns and enough powder and shot to make it back to the settlements. But Boone wasn’t done with Kentucky. On the homeward trek, the six hunters encountered Daniel’s younger brother Squire coming into the country with a fresh load of supplies. While Findley and two others stuck to their decision to return home, the Boone brothers, John Stewart, and a fourth man headed back down the Warrior’s Path.

Late that winter, Stewart left camp to check his traplines and was never seen alive again. Five years later, when Boone returned to the area at the head of a party cutting the Wilderness Road that would open Kentucky to settlement, a skeleton and a powder horn were found in the hollow of a sycamore tree. Boone recognized the horn as belonging to Stewart. He surmised that Indians had chanced upon his brother-in-law and had shot him. Stewart had managed to escape his pursuers and take shelter in the tree, then had died from his wounds.

Boone brooded over his kin’s fate, but violent death was part of the long hunter’s reality. Three years after Stewart’s disappearance, Boone’s life was again devastated when a Cherokee tortured and killed his eldest child, 16-year-old James, and later another son, a brother, and a nephew were also killed during the often bloody fighting over the settling of Kentucky. These losses deeply affected Boone, yet he never became an Indian hater.

Following Stewart’s death, Boone spent another 14 months in Kentucky. Brother Squire, who made several trips between their base camp and the Yadkin, was astonished at Daniel’s ability to endure hardship. Once, during a driving rainstorm, they took refuge under a horse blanket. Squire, who was wet, cold, and hungry, told Daniel that he’d had it with the wilderness but that “I believe you would be satisfied to remain here forever.” Replied Daniel, “You would do better not to fret about it, but try to content yourself with what we cannot help.”

For one three-month stretch Boone was alone except for the companionship of three dogs and his two favorite books, the Bible and Gulliver’s Travels. If he sensed the presence of Indians, he kept a cold camp or slept in caves. At other times he scarcely bothered to hide his presence, singing and talking aloud by a blazing fire.

Home- And Back Again

In the spring of 1771 Daniel and Squire at last headed home. On the way, Indians stole several of their horses and the winter’s take of beaver pelts. This loss, coupled with the earlier theft of deer skins, left Boone little to show for his two years in Kentucky. But the knowledge he’d gained about the country was worth a mountain of hides. In 1775 he led the first pioneers through the Cumberland Gap, and over the next decade, as settlers poured in, Boone fought Indians and continued to market hunt. Later he tried his hand as a tavern keeper, surveyor, and land agent, but he was worse at business than he’d been at farming-creditors hounded him and lawyers dragged him into court.

By the 1790s, Kentucky was filled up-at least by Boone’s standards-and its game was mostly gone. For this he blamed himself; he felt a deep ambivalence about his role in westward expansion. It was time to move on. So in 1799, at age 64, he packed all his earthly goods in a dugout canoe and, with Rebecca, headed down the Ohio for Missouri. With most of their seven surviving children and their families, the Boones settled on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, well beyond other settlements. In 1804 Boone turned 70, but er horn were found in the hollow of a sycamore tree. Boone recognized the horn as belonging to Stewart. He surmised that Indians had chanced upon his brother-in-law and had shot him. Stewart had managed to escape his pursuers and take shelter in the tree, then had died from his wounds.

Boone brooded over his kin’s fate, but violent death was part of the long hunter’s reality. Three years after Stewart’s disappearance, Boone’s life was again devastated when a Cherokee tortured and killed his eldest child, 16-year-old James, and later another son, a brother, and a nephew were also killed during the often bloody fighting over the settling of Kentucky. These losses deeply affected Boone, yet he never became an Indian hater.

Following Stewart’s death, Boone spent another 14 months in Kentucky. Brother Squire, who made several trips between their base camp and the Yadkin, was astonished at Daniel’s ability to endure hardship. Once, during a driving rainstorm, they took refuge under a horse blanket. Squire, who was wet, cold, and hungry, told Daniel that he’d had it with the wilderness but that “I believe you would be satisfied to remain here forever.” Replied Daniel, “You would do better not to fret about it, but try to content yourself with what we cannot help.”

For one three-month stretch Boone was alone except for the companionship of three dogs and his two favorite books, the Bible and Gulliver’s Travels. If he sensed the presence of Indians, he kept a cold camp or slept in caves. At other times he scarcely bothered to hide his presence, singing and talking aloud by a blazing fire.