Confined to their few rudimentary structures and beset on all sides, many of the town’s residents lost heart and returned home before the year was out.īoonesborough’s achievements were, on the face of it, modest. The teeming meadows were no mirage, but those meadows were the hunting grounds of the Shawnees, whose presence made it difficult for Boone’s party to venture beyond Boonesborough’s defended perimeter. Oases in the desert often vanish upon inspection, and it didn’t take long for Boone’s followers to reconsider their rapture. “The woods were abounding in wild game.” They named their new settlement Boonesborough, after the man who had brought them there. “So rich a soil we had never seen before covered with clover in full bloom,” gaped one of Boone’s axmen. For men used to a hardscrabble life, this was paradise. The Shawnees who lived there had carefully culled the area’s trees, letting the grass grow high and the herbivores graze. They traveled some two hundred miles in a month, cutting through thick brush, cane, and reed in search of better land.īoone and his followers found what they sought in the plains of Kentucky. His party took advantage of a convenient notch in the Appalachian mountain range, the Cumberland Gap. Plagued by debt, Boone left his home on the Yadkin River in North Carolina and wandered west.

Just a year earlier, the hunter Daniel Boone and thirty or so followers asserted an independence of a different sort. The thirteen colonies that would make up the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776.

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