Chap. XLI.} 1769. |
This text is part of:
[298]
crowd for protection round the walls of Fort Char-
tres; the ruthless spirit of reciprocal murder was not appeased, till the Illinois tribes were nearly all exterminated,1 and their beautiful and fertile plains, cooled during the summer by the ever blowing West wind, were left vacant for the white man.
Connecticut which at this time was exercising a disputed jurisdiction in the valley of Wyoming,2 did not forget that by its Charter, its possessions extended indefinitely to the West; and a company of ‘military Adventurers,’ headed by one of its most intelligent sons,3 was also soliciting leave from the Government in England to lead forth a Colony to the southwestern banks of the Mississippi.4
In his peaceful habitation on the banks of the Yadkin River, in North Carolina, Daniel Boone,5 the illustrious hunter, had heard Finley, a trader, so memorable6 as the Pioneer, describe a tract of land west of Virginia, as the richest in North America or in the world.7 In May 1769, leaving his wife and offspring,
1 John F. Schermerhorn's Report concerning the Indians inhabiting the Western Parts of the United States; Mass. Hist. Coll. XII. 8.
2 Compare Minutes of the Provincial Council, in Pennsylvania Colonial Records, IX. 606-609. Pennsylvania Archives, IV. 342-344. Miner's History of Wyoming.
3 Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New-York, i. 308.
4 W. S. Johnson to Jos. Trumbull, 15 April, 1769. Compare Martin's Louisiana, II. 35; Monette's Valley of the Mississippi, i. 407, 408.
5 ‘Boone was born in Virginia,’ McLung, 49. ‘Boone was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, on the right bank of the Delaware river,’ Collins, 182. Boone ‘was born in Maryland,’ Marshall, i. 17. ‘The advancing settlements of Schuylkill,’ Morehead, 17. ‘Bridgeworth, Somersetshire, England,’ Niles, IV. 33, confounding perhaps the birth-place of his father, with that of Daniel Boone himself. Daniel himself does not seem to have thought about where or when he was born. Filson writes the name Boon.
6 Compare J. T. Morehead's Address in commemoration, &c. 16, and Marshall's History of Kentucky, i. 7, 8.
7 Filson's Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucky, published in 1784, and authenticated by a certificate from Boone and Todd and Harrod.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.