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39 6 Boone’s First Hunts in Kentucky Boone did not go to hunt in Kentucky to fulfill a lifelong objective of opening up new territory for white settlement. Although his hunting and trail blazing doubtless played a key role in opening up Kentucky to white settlement, it would be after-the-fact and ideological history to think that he went into Kentucky for that purpose. Boone wanted to go to Kentucky because he had heard from John Findley and others that the land was rich and the wild game plentiful. He enjoyed hunting, he made his living hunting, and like most American settlers, he was interested in getting good land cheap. Game abounded in Kentucky. Boone may have heard about the amount of game killed by Dr. Thomas Walker and his group, who in 1750 were the first British colonists to go up through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky from the south. A few earlier colonists had been taken across the gap as captives of the Shawnees or the Cherokees before Walker’s trip, but they did not write about what they saw.1 Walker did. Walker was a physician, merchant, surveyor, and landowner in Albemarle County, Virginia. In 1748 he had explored the Holston River in northeastern Tennessee with Col. James Patton, the first British settler to apply to Virginia for grants of trans-Appalachian land—the Patton who was to be killed by the Indians at Draper’s Meadow seven years later. In 1749 Walker was engaged by the Loyal Company, to which the Virginia Council had awarded 800,000 acres west of the Appalachians , to “go to the Westward to discover a proper place for a Settlement.”2 The company set off on March 6, 1750, from Dr. Walker’s home in Virginia, went west and south on the Holston River into northern North Carolina, crossed the Clinch and the Powell rivers, and then turned north up through a majestic gap that Dr. Walker called the “Cumberland Gap,” in honor of the Frontiersman 40 duke of Cumberland, who had defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie and the rebellious Scots at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Walker and his men continued into the center of what is now eastern Kentucky. Instead of following an Indian trail northward, which would have led to the rich bluegrass country, Walker followed the Cumberland River toward the west and was discouraged by the thickness of the canebrake and the laurel thickets and by the lack of fodder for the horses. His party turned back, returning to Walker’s home in Virginia on July 13. Walker noted in his journal for that day: “We killed in the Journey 13 Buffaloes, 6 Elks, 53 Bears, 20 Deer, 4 Wild Geese, about 150 Turkeys, besides small Game. We might have killed three times as much meat, if we had wanted it.”3 A bag of that size in four months—for men whose objective was to explore, not to hunt—would have sounded temptingly plentiful to a hunter like Boone. Boone did not go to Kentucky directly after he rejoined Rebecca in 1762. He moved with her and his children back to the Yadkin, to a farm on Sugartree Creek that probably was part of the land owned by Rebecca’s father. With the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 and the Indian attacks in 1763–64, settlers who had fled east came back to the Yadkin, and new settlers arrived. By 1765 there were four times as many people on the forks of the Yadkin as there had been when the Boones moved there in 1750.4 As a result, it was harder for Boone to find much game around his place, and he ranged farther, frequently hunting in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina. On some of Boone’s hunts up into the mountains, he took with him his young son James, his first child, who had been born in 1757, to teach him the business of hunting. Boone remembered hunting with James on snowy winter nights and “hugging him up to him” to try to keep him warm.5 Boone’s debts mounted as he bought hunting provisions and as the game dwindled. A lawyer remembered him as having had “more suits entered against him for debt than any other man of his day, chiefly small debts of five pounds and under, contracted for powder and shot.”6 In 1764 the Rowan County Court entered a judgment...

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