XIV “For Our Children, Our Children!”
As soon as the Indian scare was silenced, all the world seemed rushing to Missouri. Ferries ran by day and night. Patriarchal planters of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia passed ever west in long, unending caravans of flocks, servants, herds, into the new land of the Louisianas. New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, six, eight, and ten horses to a waggon, and cattle with their hundred bells, tinkled through the streets of St. Louis.
“Where are you going, now?” inquired the citizens.
“To Boone’s Lick, to be sure.”
“Go no further,” said Clark, ever enthusiastic about St. Louis. “Buy here. This will be the city.”
“But ah!” exclaimed the emigrant. “If land is so good here what must Boone’s Lick be!”
Perennial childhood of the human heart, ever looking for Canaan just beyond!
The Frenchmen shrugged their shoulders at the strange energy of these progressive “Bostonnais.” It annoyed them to have their land titles looked into. “A process! a lawsuit!” they clasped their hands in despair. But ever the people of St. Louis put up their lands to a better figure, and watched out of their little square lattices for the coming of les Américains.
All the talk was of land, land, land! The very wealth of ancient estates lay unclaimed for the first heir to enter, the gift of God.
In waggons, on foot and horseback, with packhorses, handcarts, and wheelbarrows, with blankets on their backs and children by the hand, the oppressed of the old world fled across the new.
“Why do you go into the wilderness?”
“For my children, my children,” answered the pioneer.
More and more came people in a mighty flood, peasants, artisans, sons of the old crusaders, children of feudal knights of chivalry and romance, descendants of the hardy Norsemen who captured Europe five hundred years before, scions of Europe’s most titled names, thronging to our West.
Frosts and crop failures in the Atlantic States and a financial panic uprooted old Revolutionary centres. “A better country, a better country!” was the watchword of the mobile nation.
“Let’s go over to the Territory,” said the soldiers of 1812. “Let us go to Arkansas, where corn can be had for sixpence a bushel and pork for a penny a pound. Two days’ work in Texas is equal to the labour of a week in the North.” And on they pressed into No Man’s Land, a land of undeveloped orchards, maple syrup and honey, fields of cotton and wool and corn.
Conestoga waggons crowded on the Alleghanies, teams fell down precipices and perished, but the tide pushed madly on. Colonies of hundreds were pouring into Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois. New towns were named for their founders, new counties, lakes, rivers, streams, and hills,—the settlers wrote their names upon the geography of the nation.
In the midst of the war Daniel Boone had come down to Clark at St. Louis.
“I have spoken to Henry Clay about your claim,” said the Governor. “He says Congress will do something for you.”
“Now Rebecca, thee shall hev a house!”
That house, the joint product of Nathan, the Colonel, and his slaves, was a work of years. Not far from the old cabin by the spring it stood, convenient to the Judgment Tree. For Boone still held his court beneath the spreading elm.
The stones were quarried and chiselled, two feet thick, and laid so solidly that to-day the walls of the old Boone mansion are as good as new. The plaster was mixed and buried in the ground over winter to ripen. Roomy and comfortable, two stories and an attic it was built, with double verandas and chimneys at either end, the finest mansion on the border.
But in March Rebecca died. Boone buried her where he could watch the mound.
The house was finished. The Colonel bought a coffin and put it under the bed to be ready. Sometimes he tried his coffin, to see how it would seem when he slept beside Rebecca.
In December came the land, a thousand arpents in his Spanish grant. “If I only cud hev told Rebecca,” sobbed Daniel, kneeling at her grave. “She war a good woman, and the faithful companion of all my wanderings.”
In the Spring Boone sold his land, and set out for Kentucky.
“Daniel Boone has come! Daniel Boone has come!” Old hunters, Revolutionary heroes, came for miles to see their leader who had opened Kentucky. There was a reception at Maysville. Parties were given in his honour wherever he went. Once more he embraced his old friend, Simon Kenton.
“How much do I owe ye?” he said to one and another.
Whatever amount they named, that he paid, and departed. One day the dusty old hunter re-entered his son’s house on the Femme Osage with fifty cents in his pocket.
“Now I am ready and willing to die. I have paid all my debts and nobody can say, ‘Boone was a dishonest man.’”
Then came the climax of his life.
“Nate, I am goin’ to the Yellowstone.”
While Clark was holding his peace treaties, Daniel Boone, eighty-two years old, with a dozen others set out in boats for the Upper Missouri.
Autumn came. Somewhere in the present Montana, they threw up a winter camp and were besieged by Indians. A heavy snow-storm drove the Indians off. In early Spring, coming down the Missouri on the return, again they were attacked by Indians and landed in a thicket of the opposite shore. Under cover of a storm in the night Boone ordered them into the boat, and silently in the pelting rain they escaped.
Boone himself brought the furs to St. Louis, and went back with a bag full of money and a boat full of emigrants.
Farther and farther into his district emigrants began setting up their four-post sassafras bedsteads and scouring their pewter platters. Women walked thirty miles to hear the first piano that came into the Boone settlement.
In the last year of the war Boone’s favourite grandson was killed at Charette.
“The history of the settlement of the western country is my history,” said the old Colonel in his grief. “Two darling sons, a grandson, and a brother have I lost by savage hands, besides valuable horses and abundance of cattle. Many sleepless nights have I spent, separated from the society of men, an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness.”
“You must paint Daniel Boone,” said Governor Clark to Chester Harding, a young American artist fresh from Paris in the summer of 1819. The Governor was Harding’s first sitter. He invited the Indians into his studio.
“Ugh! ugh! ugh!” grunted the Osage chiefs, putting their noses close and rubbing their fingers across the Governor’s portrait.
In June Harding set out up the Missouri to paint Boone. In an old blockhouse of the War of 1812, he found him lying on a bunk, roasting a strip of venison wound around his ramrod, turning it before the fire.
“What? Paint my pictur’?”
“Yes, on canvas. Make a portrait, you know.”
The old man consented. With amazement the frontiersman saw the picture grow,—still more amazed, his grandchildren watched the likeness of “granddad” growing on the canvas.
Ruddy and fair, with silvered locks, always humming a tune, he sat in his buckskin hunting-shirt trimmed with otter’s fur, and the knife in his belt he had carried on his first expedition to Kentucky.
Every day now, in his leisure hours, the old pioneer was busily scraping with a piece of glass. “Making a powder-horn,” he said. “Goin’ to hunt on the Fork in the Fall.”
A hundred miles up the Kansas he had often set his traps, but Boone’s legs were getting shaky, his eyes were growing dim. Every day now he tried his coffin,—it was shining and polished and fair, of the wood he loved best, the cherry. People came for miles to look at Boone’s coffin.