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HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA

VOLUME 6




  [Illustration: CUMBERLAND GAP AND BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD]




  HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
  VOLUME 6

  Boone's Wilderness Road

  BY
  ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT

  _With Maps and Illustrations_

  [Illustration]

  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
  CLEVELAND, OHIO
  1903




  COPYRIGHT, 1903
  BY
  THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS


                                      PAGE
  PREFACE                               11
    I. THE PILGRIMS OF THE WEST         19
   II. THE FIRST EXPLORERS              48
  III. ANNALS OF THE ROAD               78
   IV. KENTUCKY IN THE REVOLUTION      145
    V. AT THE END OF BOONE'S ROAD      175




ILLUSTRATIONS


    I. CUMBERLAND GAP AND BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD       _Frontispiece_
   II. PLAT OF BOONESBOROUGH                                        97
  III. FILSON'S MAP OF KENTUCKY                                    119




PREFACE


The naming of our highways is an interesting study. Like roads the world
over they are usually known by two names--the destinations to which they
lead. The famous highway through New York state is known as the Genesee
Road in the eastern half of the state and as the Albany Road in the
western portion. In a number of cities through which it passes--Utica,
Syracuse, etc.--it is Genesee Street. This path in the olden time was
the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old Forbes Road across
Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name; but it is preserved at its
termination, for the Pittsburger of today goes to the Carnegie Library
on the "Forbes Street" car line. The Maysville Pike--as unknown today as
it was of national prominence three quarters of a century ago--leading
across Ohio from Wheeling to Maysville (Limestone) and on to Lexington,
is known in Kentucky as the Zanesville Pike; from that city in Ohio the
road branched off from the old National Road. The "Glade Road" was the
important branch of the Pennsylvania or Pittsburg Road which led through
the Glades of the Alleghenies to the Youghiogheny. One of the most
singular names for a road was that of the "Shun Pike" between Watertown
and Erie, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The large traffic over the old
"French Road"--Marin's Portage Road--between these points on Lake Erie
and French Creek necessitated, early in the nineteenth century, a good
road-bed. Accordingly a road company took hold of the route and improved
it--placing toll gates on it for recompensation. Those who refused to
pay toll broke open a parallel route nearby, which was as free as it was
rough. It became known as the "Shun" Pike because those who traversed it
shunned the toll road.

Few roads named from their builders, such as Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet,
Wayne, Ebenezer Zane, Marin, and Boone preserved the oldtime name.
Indeed nearly all our roads have lost the ancient name, a fact that
should be sincerely mourned. The Black Swamp has been drained, therefore
there can be now no "Black Swamp Road." There are now no refugees and
the "Refugees Road" is lost not only to sight but to the memory of most.
Perhaps there is but one road in the central West which is commonly
known and called by the old Indian name; this is the "Tuscarawas Path,"
a modern highway in Eastern Ohio which was widened and made a white
man's road by the first white army that ever crossed the Ohio River into
what is now the State of Ohio.

One roadway--the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and
Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in
America--holds the oldtime name with undiminished loyalty and is true
today to every gloomy description and vile epithet that was ever written
or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man's use by Daniel Boone
from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River, Tennessee, to the
mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River in the month preceding the
outbreak of open revolution at Lexington and Concord. It was known as
"Boone's Trail," the "Kentucky Road," the "road to Caintuck," or the
"Virginia Road," but its common name was the "Wilderness Road." A
wilderness of laurel thickets lay between the Kentucky settlements and
Cumberland Gap and was the most desolate country imaginable. The name
was transferred to the road that passed through it. It seems right that
the brave frontiersman who opened this route to white men should be
remembered by this act; and for a title to this volume "Boone's
Wilderness Road" has been selected.

As in the case of other highways with which this series of monographs is
dealing, so with Boone's Wilderness Road: the road itself is of little
consequence. The following pages treat of phases of the story of the
West suggested by Boone's Road--the first social movement into the lower
Ohio Valley, Henderson's Transylvania Company, the struggle of the
Watauga settlement to prevent the southern Indians from cutting Kentucky
off from the world, the struggle of the Kentucky settlements against
the British and their Indian allies, the burst of population over
Boone's Road into Kentucky, and what the early founding of that
commonwealth meant to the East and to the West.

Boone and Harrod and their compatriots assured the world of the splendid
lands of Kentucky; Richard Henderson and his associates of the
Transylvania Company proved the questionable fact that a settlement
there could be made and be maintained. Boone's Road, opened for the
Transylvania Company, made a way thither. The result was a marvelous
westward movement that for timeliness, heroism and ultimate success is
without a parallel in our annals. When the armies of the Revolutionary
War are counted, that first army of twenty-five thousand men, women, and
children which hurried over Boone's little path, through dark Powell's
Valley, over the "high-swung gateway" of Cumberland Gap, and down
through the laurel wildernesses to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington,
and Louisville must not be forgotten. No army ever meant so much to the
West; some did not mean more to the East.

The author is greatly indebted for facts and figures to Thomas Speed's
invaluable study _The Wilderness Road_, and to other Filson Club
Publications, and for inspiration and suggestion to Mr. Allen's _The
Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_.

                                                              A. B. H.

Marietta, Ohio, May 20, 1903.




Boone's Wilderness Road


    _It is impossible to come upon this road without pausing,
    or to write of it without a tribute._

                                         --JAMES LANE ALLEN.




CHAPTER I

THE PILGRIMS OF THE WEST


No English colony in America looked upon the central West with such
jealous eye as Virginia. The beautiful valley of the _Oyo_--the Indian
exclamation for "Beautiful"--which ran southwesterly through the great
forests of the continent's interior was early claimed as the sole
possession of the Virginians. The other colonies were hemmed in by
prescribed boundary lines, definitely outlined in their royal charters.
New York was bounded by Lake Erie and the Allegheny and thought little
of the West. The Pennsylvanian colony was definitely bounded by the line
which is the western boundary line of that commonwealth today.
Carolina's extremity stopped at thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes.
Virginia's western boundary was not defined; hence the West was hers.

England herself was not at all sure of the West until after the fall of
Quebec; but the Treaty of Paris was soon signed and, so far as the
French were concerned, the colonies extended to the Mississippi. Then
Pontiac's bloody war broke out and matters were at a standstill until
Bouquet hewed his way into "the heart of the enemies' country" and, on
the Muskingum, brought Pontiac's desperate allies, the Delawares and
Shawanese, to terms.

But now, when the West was his, the king of England did a wondrous
thing. He issued a proclamation in the year 1763 which forbade anyone
securing "patents for any lands beyond the heads or sources of any of
the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West or
Northwest!" Thus Lord Hillsborough, British Secretary for the Colonies,
thought to checkmate what he called the "roving disposition" of the
colonists, particularly the Virginians. The other colonies were
restrained by definite boundaries; Virginia, too, should be restrained.

Hillsborough might as well have adopted the plan of the ignoramus who,
when methods for keeping the Indians from crossing the frontier were
being discussed, suggested that a strip of land along the entire western
frontier be cleared of trees and bushes, in the belief that the savages
would not dare to cross the open! Yet the secretary's agent set to work
to mark out a western boundary line which should connect the western
lines of Georgia and New York and so accomplish the limitation of
Virginia.

But the Virginians also acted. They sent an agent of their own, Thomas
Walker, to Fort Stanwix (Rome, New York) to treat with the Six Nations
for some of this very western land that Hillsborough was contriving to
keep them out of. For the king issued the proclamation in the interest
of the western Indians (and the annuities he received when the fur trade
was prosperous) who desired that the West should be preserved to them.
But what could be said if Virginia purchased the Indian's claim? Could a
king's proclamation keep the Virginians from a territory to which, for
value received, the Indians had given a quit-claim deed?

This famous Treaty of Fort Stanwix was held in the fall of 1768. Three
thousand Indians were present. Presents were lavished upon the
chieftains. The western boundary line crossed from the west branch of
the Susquehanna to Kittanning on the Allegheny River; it followed the
Allegheny and Ohio Rivers southwest to the mouth of the Great Kanawha.
Here it met Hillsborough's line which came up from Florida and which
made the Great Kanawha the western boundary of Virginia. Had the Fort
Stanwix line stopped here the western boundary line of the colonies
would have been as Lord Hillsborough desired. But Walker did not pause
here. Sir