Boone: A Biography (44 page)

Boone had first worked as a locator for James Hickman in 1774. He continued to work as a land jobber off and on for the rest of his years spent in Kentucky. It was one of the best ways of earning a living. He was famous for knowing the landscape of Kentucky, and he was much in demand, but he knew the land as a hunter, not as plots already registered in the land office. Many of the tracts he located or later surveyed overlapped with other claims. As the years passed, these “shingled” boundaries became a major cause of grief and ugly litigation, and a source of wealth for young lawyers such as Henry Clay. It was inevitable that those who lost their land would blame the man who had located it in the first place.

In 1783 Boone would pass an exam and be licensed as a deputy surveyor by the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was handsomely paid for finding and surveying land for others all over Kentucky, and it is said he was sometimes paid in parcels of land. “
He should have part of the land claimed
for his Trouble and immediately it became a custom to
give one Half of the land for clearing it out of his office and this is what Boone got for Clearing out those four tracts.” “
Wm. Mountjoy, surveyor of Pendleton Co.
, surveyed it for John Grant Aug. 29, 1779—one half of which the said Daniel [Boone] was to have for locating same.” Whether Boone was given land as fees for his locating and surveying or not, he acquired parcel after parcel. He was well on his way to becoming a major landowner himself.

As one of the explorers and founders of Kentucky, Boone probably felt he was entitled as much as anyone else to share in the exploding prosperity.
Nathan Boone said at one time his father
may have claimed as much as a hundred thousand acres of the Great Meadow. Extant records show that Boone actually owned, at most, about 31,267 acres.

Boone was a careless businessman but not necessarily a careless surveyor. “
He had no problem running simple square
or oblong surveys,” Nathan Boone told Lyman Draper, “and he could do the necessary calculations. I would suppose that in the woods he could run a line as straight as the next man.” About the technical details of basic surveying, Boone was probably as competent as many at the time. The problem was that much of the land he surveyed overlapped with tracts claimed by others. Owners and would-be owners and lawyers were involved in boundary disputes and entangled in litigation for years to come. Officials in the land office often didn’t know when claims were “shingled” since they had no way of knowing exactly where the boundaries of the claims were relative to other claims. Later the joke was that Kentucky surveyors were never accurate except by accident.

Boone’s future problems were caused less by his surveying skills than by his disdain for the details of business and legal matters. Often he did not bother to register deeds properly after land was surveyed or to look up records in the county office. Or he would not follow up on a business venture to see it through, preferring to move on to another, and then another. Boone’s genius in the woods and at scenes of danger seemed to desert him in the courthouse, law office, counting room. An honest man himself, he assumed everyone else was honest also and that a man’s word was his bond. Again and again Boone was
cheated, robbed of claims, perhaps because of faulty surveys, but more often for lack of documents, vague certificates. Boone’s greatest weakness was also one of the most admirable features of his character: he trusted people. And once a claim was contested, his tendency was to abandon it and move on. He seemed unable or unwilling to adapt to the aggressive commercial and legal culture that was overwhelming the new territory. The dream of hunting and peaceful coexistence with the Indians in the garden of Kentucky was gravely threatened. He must have seen no alternative but to be a part of the new culture and over the next few years entangled himself in messes of duplicated claims, deals gone sour. He was often blamed for claims lost by others, and as a peaceable and honest man he felt obliged to pay those who accused him. He lived as a hunter, dividing what he had among others. That was the code of the woods and the frontier, share and share alike. That was the code of the Indians.

“
Hospitality and kindness are among the virtues
of the first settlers. Exposed to common dangers and toils, they became united by closest ties of social intercourse,” John Mason Peck would write. That sense of community may have been common among the very first settlers, but it was quickly lost in the rush to develop the new territory. The hunger to acquire land seemed insatiable and reckless. Around this time John Todd, who lived at Lexington, wrote to a friend, “
I am afraid to lose sight of my house
lest some invader should take possession.”

Nowhere else in North America was the change from frontier to a culture with pretensions to polite society, gentility, and commercial prosperity more rapid than in Kentucky. Between 1775, when Boone built Boonesborough, and 1792, when Kentucky was admitted into the union as a state, the Bluegrass region was transformed from a wilderness of buffalo, Indians, and hunters to a district of plantations, towns, horse farms, courthouses, ballrooms and racetracks, law offices and schools. The first Latin school in Kentucky was established in Lexington in the early 1780s. Small holdings were replaced by large plantations producing hemp worked by slaves. The transformation must have been disconcerting for many, especially those as fond of privacy as
Boone. As Otis K. Rice writes, “
In the spring of 1780 three hundred boatloads
of settlers arrived at the Falls of the Ohio alone.”

The irony was probably not entirely lost on Boone at this time that his exploration, his organizing, his opening of Boone’s Trace, had helped bring on this flood of greed and contention and pretension. As the Indians retreated farther north of the Ohio River, because of attacks on their villages, so did the game. Heavy hunting and trapping, and wanton killing of buffalo, took their toll. Soon no buffalo at all were to be seen at the licks or in the meadows. Bears could be found in the mountains to the east, but you had to go farther and farther to hunt them. The beavers thinned out quickly along the streams and soon disappeared. The canebrakes were cut down as the land was cleared, and soon the whispering cane where panthers and bears and Shawnees and turkeys hid was just a memory.

It is painful to watch Boone at this period move out of his chosen calling of hunter, scout, leader, and settler, into realms for which he was so ill suited. There are hundreds of documents, letters, in Boone’s handwriting, pertaining to his land surveys and speculations. The business grew so rapidly he may have lost count of some of the parcels and acres and titles. “
The 2000 acres of Land you ar to make me a titel
to out of your 5000 acres,” Boone wrote to one client, “I have sold to Mr. James Parbery and Desire you would Make him a Deed.”

Boone located and surveyed claims for former Transylvania Company associates such as Thomas and Nathaniel Hart. He was getting into the big time and becoming one of the big men of the frontier, like the Harts, like Henderson and Logan. In February of 1780 Boone agreed to collect money and land certificates from a number of friends, including the Harts and his son-in-law Will Hays, and to ride to the capital in Williamsburg to purchase treasury warrants for more land. With each treasury warrant, he and his friends and acquaintances could claim a specified number of acres wherever they could find land not already surveyed and registered. The Harts gave him twenty-four hundred pounds, and his son-in-law Will Hays four hundred pounds
for a land claim on the Licking River. It was said that Boone carried with him more than twenty thousand dollars in Virginia money devalued by inflation and that all that money was stolen from him at an inn in Virginia.

Recent scholarship has thrown new light
on the incident, though many aspects of the episode remain a mystery. It is not known who Boone’s traveling companion was on that journey to Williamsburg. Examining Fayette County, Kentucky, land records and court documents, and reports of the robbery in the July 26, 1780, issue of the
Virginia Gazette
, the scholar Neal O. Hammon discovered that Boone was robbed of 6,061 pounds’ worth of land certificates at the home of one “James Byrd of James City County” on the night of March 20, 1780. James City County is the county where Williamsburg is located. The certificates, signed by the clerk of the Commissioners Court, stated that the citizen named was eligible to buy vacant land in Kentucky at a designated price.

The distance from Boone’s Station to Williamsburg was over six hundred miles, and much of that distance was over very rough trails. The winter of 1779–80 was the coldest on record, and no doubt Boone and his companion had to travel much of the way through ice and snow. Until the travelers passed beyond Cumberland Gap going east, there was still a danger of being attacked by small bands of Indians. Experienced travelers usually slept in thickets or canebrakes, with no fires, so as not to be spotted by brigands or Indians. But with weather so bitter cold they probably had no choice but to keep a fire burning all night.

John May, who traveled this route in the other direction a little later in the year, recorded these details: “
[It is] uninhabited Country the most rugged
and dismal I ever passed through, there being thousands of dead Horses Cattle on the Road Side which occasioned a continual Stench; and one Half the way there were no Springs, which compelled us to make use of water from the Streams in which many of these dead animals lay.”

The route Boone and his companion would have taken, after they crossed through Moccasin Gap and then the Holston at about the site of later Kingsport, Tennessee, would take them east to Wolf Hills (later Abingdon) and on toward Draper’s Meadows, on the New River. From there they proceeded to Roanoke, and then down the James River valley to the tidewater region. It shows the extraordinary trust placed in Boone that so many would ask him to carry their savings and purchase certificates over this dangerous route to Williamsburg.

Taverns in those days were often just private dwellings beside the road where guests were served in the dining area and some travelers unrolled their blankets or bearskins by the parlor fire. Those paying more for lodging would sleep in an upstairs bedroom. It seems almost certain that the food or drink Boone and his associate were served at James Byrd’s house was drugged, for as soon as they retired to their room and locked the door, they fell into a deep sleep and never woke until daylight. When they did rise they found the door open, the saddlebags rifled, and Boone’s papers scattered on the floor. Some money that Boone had been carrying was found in bottles in the basement, but most of the money, and the certificates for land, were gone, all except Boone’s own warrants, which he must have kept in a separate place, probably his personal wallet or budget. The landlord, of course, declared his innocence and claimed he had no idea what they were talking about. The house was searched, and the yard and stables were searched.
Only the small amount of money
in the bottles in the cellar was ever found.

History and folklore are filled with stories of travelers robbed and even murdered at inns. Certainly the American frontier was familiar with many such stories. But James City County was far from the Virginia frontier, in the oldest and most settled part of the Old Dominion. We cannot know if Boone failed to take necessary precautions or was acquainted with those who managed the tavern. The best-known account of the robbery, told by Nathan Boone to Draper, describes an old woman hiding in a chest or wardrobe until the men were asleep and
then fleeing with the notes. Nathan Boone said, “
The door was found open next morning
.” But the court records of Fayette County make it clear Boone was robbed of a sheaf of land certificates. This is an odd theft because the certificates were numbered and could be traced after they were used. A good guess is that the thief thought he or she was stealing paper money in the dark and was disappointed to find that many sheets were certificates for land that had to be purchased, located, surveyed, then registered in the land office, and probably threw them away or burned them.

The price of land was inflating rapidly in Kentucky. By 1780 the land in the Bluegrass region had been claimed, some tracts by two or three parties at once, and the old military warrants for veterans had been taken up, many sold to speculators. Boone had gone to Williamsburg with his friends’ money and certificates to buy preemption warrants at the old low price of forty pounds per one hundred acres, or four hundred pounds per thousand acres, which was “dirt” cheap compared to the selling prices in Louisville and Lexington. (British currency still seemed to be the medium of exchange in land transactions, even as Americans were fighting the Crown for independence.)

After the robbery Boone had no choice but to ride back to Kentucky empty handed and face the investors who had lost their cash and their land warrants. Some spread rumors that Boone had stolen the money and certificates and made up the story of the robbery. It was a painful and humiliating episode, second perhaps only to the court-martial of eighteen months before. Luckily the Harts and Hayses and some of the others trusted Boone implicitly and never asked him to cover their losses. He was sorry especially because others had lost so much. It would seem that many of Boone’s friends recovered at least some of their losses, for “
Receipts from Public Auditors
,” June 23, 1781, in the Land Office of Fayette County, records a list of figures: “We the Public Auditors of the Commonwealth of Virginia do hereby certify that William Hays hath delivered us the Treasurers receipt for four hundred pounds . . . and that the said William Hays is entitled to one
thousand acres . . . on preemption of waste or unappropriated Lands within this commonwealth . . . given under my hands this 23rd June 1781 T. C. Randolph.”

Thomas Hart wrote a strong statement of trust in Boone to his brother Nathaniel on August 3, 1780:

I feel for the poor people
who perhaps are to loose even their preemptions by it, but I must Say I feel more for poor Boone whose Character I am told Suffers by it, much degenerated, must the people of this Age be, when Amoungst them are to be found men to Censure and Blast the Character and Reputation of a person So Just and upright and in whose Breast is a Seat of Virtue too pure to admit of a thought so Base and dishonorable I have known Boone in times of Old, when Poverty and distress had him fast by the hand, And in these Wretched Sircumstances I ever found him of a Noble and generous Soul despising every thing mean.