Boone's Wilderness Road
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Volume 6 of the series "Historic Highways of America". According to Wikipedia: "Archer Butler Hulbert (26 Jan 1873 – 24 Dec 1933), historical geographer, writer, and professor of American history... He was Vice-Principal of the Putnam Military Academy, Zanesville, Ohio, until 1897. Hulbert then did newspaper work in Korea in 1897 and '98: he was editor of the Korean Independent (Seoul) and edited Far East American newspapers... He was Professor of American History at Marietta College 1904-18. After Marietta College, Hulbert became a lecturer in American History at Clark University from 1918 to 1919. He also was a lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1904 and 1923; and he served as archivist for the Harvard Commission on Western History (1912-16). Hulbert's last position was at Colorado College, from 1920 until his death... Hulbert's interest in trails dated from fishing trips taken during his college, when he noticed Indian trails. This interest led at first to his 16 volumes of Historic Highways of America (1902-05)."
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Boone's Wilderness Road - Archer Butler Hulbert
Cumberland Gap and Boone’s Wilderness Road
BOONE’S WILDERNESS ROAD BY ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT
HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA VOLUME 6
With Maps and Illustrations
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY, CLEVELAND, OHIO, 1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903 BY The Arthur H. Clark Company
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published by Seltzer Books
established in 1974
offering over 14,000 books
feedback welcome: seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
Books about Roads and Highways, available from Seltzer Books:
Historic Highways of America multi-volume series by Hulbert
Paths of the Mound-Building Indians
Washington's Road
Braddock's Road
The Old Glade Road
Boone's Wilderness Road
Portage Paths
Military Roads of the Mississippi Basin
The Waterways of Westward Expansion
The Cumberland Road
Pioneer Roads and Experiences of Travelers, volumes 1 and 2
The Great American Canals
Main-Travelled Roads by Garland
Other Main-Travelled Roads by Garland
Roads of Destiny by O. Henry
The Road by Jack London
The Golden Road by Montgomery
The Life of Thomas Telford, Civil Engineer by Smiles
The Underground Rail Road by Still
The Road to Oz by Baum
PREFACE
CHAPTER I THE PILGRIMS OF THE WEST
CHAPTER II THE FIRST EXPLORERS
CHAPTER III ANNALS OF THE ROAD
CHAPTER IV KENTUCKY IN THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER V AT THE END OF BOONE’S ROAD
FOOTNOTES:
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.
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