Daniel Boone by John Mack Faragher

Author:John Mack Faragher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Boone was on the Yadkin by November 9, 1778, where a diarist noted his return: “Mr. Daniel Boone was here. He was seized recently by the English near the Salt Springs in Kentuck, but escaped.” Rebecca and the five children were living in a cabin on the property of her uncle Billy Bryan, husband of Boone’s sister Mary. After his arrival Boone moved them to a larger cabin on Rebecca’s father’s place that could accommodate the entire family, including Jemima and Flanders, Susy and Will, both of whom were beginning families of their own. That winter Boone hunted his old grounds in the Blue Ridge.

There are hints that all was not well between Boone and Rebecca. “The history of my going home, and returning with my family,” Filson quoted Boone as saying, “forms a series of difficulties, an account of which would swell a volume,” but he said no more. His cryptic allusion to “difficulties” has been the source of considerable speculation, much of it focusing on the possibility of “Boone’s surprise,” misplacing the incident of marital infidelity that occurred during a much earlier period of their married life. It is more likely that he referred to a conflict over their return to Kentucky. Nathan Boone believed that his mother “may have well opposed” moving back to the frightening “dangers and exposures” from which she had fled. Moreover, he thought “the Bryans, some of whom were Tories, might have used their influence to prevail upon Mrs. Boone not to return.” Boone had cast his fate with Kentucky and was determined to go back, but he may have had considerable difficulty convincing Rebecca.

The balance in favor of a return was tipped by the coming of revolutionary conflict to the South. The military campaigns of 1778 and 1779 took place in Georgia and South Carolina but their reverberating effects were felt in backcountry North Carolina, and in the subsequent and final years of the war civil violence completely engulfed the Yadkin. Partisan feeling ran high in the Boone and Bryan neighborhoods, where there was growing support for the patriot cause and increasing hostility to Loyalism. The North Carolina Tories “had to run off,” one man concluded, they were so hated. A person “could hardly get along the road for them,” he wrote, and the emigration to Kentucky in 1779 was “all grand tories, pretty nigh.” Although this is an exaggeration, there is little doubt that the party Boone organized for the return to Kentucky included a good many Loyalists. Many of the Bryans who had not previously emigrated decided that despite the Indian terrors in the West, their families would be safer in Kentucky than in North Carolina. Rebecca’s uncle Morgan Bryan moved his family across the mountains, then returned to fight with the Loyalists, and was killed in an engagement near the Bryan Settlement in 1781.

During the spring and summer of 1779 Boone recruited emigrants throughout the Yadkin settlements. Adding weight to his arguments was the passage by Virginia of a law that promised to regularize the sale and allocation of western land.

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