The Mammoth Book of the West Read Online Free Page B

of Cumberland. This road to the interior would direct the course of Western settlement until after the Revolution.
    But Walker himself, to his dismay, failed to locate the bluegrass country of Indian lore. Two years later, a Pennsylvanian trader by the name of John Finley did. Like many of the West’s discoveries, it happened by accident. Finley was captured while canoeing down the Ohio with his wares by a party of Shawnees, who took him to their hunting encampment in the Kentucky lowlands. Finley escaped to tell his tale, but the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Rebellion temporarily ended further exploration.
    With the coming of peace, interest in bountiful Kentucky revived, especially among the backcountry’s famous “long hunters”, so-called because of the awesome distances they covered in pursuit of fur and flesh. For the coonskin-capped long hunters, the wild woods held nodangers, only adventure, wealth and nearly everything they needed to live: hides for their clothes, game and wild vegetables for their food, salt from natural brine licks, and even the “panes” for their cabin windows (made from doeskin membranes made translucent with bear oil). The furs of bear, beaver and other lush-coated animals were used to barter for the few items, such as gun and powder, that nature omitted to provide.
    Long hunters began infiltrating Kentucky from the summer of 1766, men like Captain James Smith, Isaac Lindsay, James Harrod (the Latin reader who founded the stockade on the trail known as the Wilderness Road that became the state’s first proper settlement) and Michael Stoner. But the most famous of them, and the one who would play the greatest role in the exploration of “Kentucke”, was Daniel Boone.
    Boone was born on 2 November 1734, to a Quaker family in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Boone’s parents seem to have had problems with the Friends over a daughter’s marriage outside the faith. This, and the rising fever over Western land settlement caused the Boones to move to the raw Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There Daniel Boone learned to farm and, under the guidance of friendly Indians, the lore of the wild. For a period he fought in the Seven Years’ War (where he met John Finley, a fellow waggoner on Braddock’s ill-starred expedition), returning afterwards to the Yadkin. On 14 August 1756 he married a neighbourhood farm girl, Rebecca Bryan. Their marriage, however, was not the conventional frontier mating. Boone had the wanderlust. From spring to fall he farmed, but then took off for the winter on hunting trips, alone save for a packhorse to carry pelts.
    Such was Daniel Boone’s life until 1766. In that year he met up with his brother-in-law, John Stewart, who had just been into Kentucky with the expedition of VirginianBen Cutbird. Hearing Stewart recount the verdant wonders of the region, Boone resolved to go himself. He made his first trip to Kentucky in the winter of 1767, hoping to find the bluegrass country of Finley’s captivity. Instead, he ending up wandering the hills south of the Big Sandy River. Boone made another try for the bluegrass land in May 1769 – he had now all but given up farming – this time accompanied by John Finley and two other long hunters. After passing through the Cumberland Gap the group followed the Warrior’s Path across Kentucky as far as Station Camp Creek where they built a shelter to protect their furs. They then split up to explore the wilderness. Alone for most of the time, Boone spent months dodging Shawnee war parties (he was once captured, but escaped by diving into a giant canebrake) and living off the land. His great wander took him as far north as the Ohio, and over most of the great bluegrass region. When he met up with his brother, Squire Boone, on the Red River on 27 July 1770, he knew more about Kentucky than any other White man.
    He had also fallen in love with it, with its level bluegrass fields and gentle cool streams. “I returned home to my