In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

200 16 Trading and Land Speculation Master of All He Surveyed? What Colonel Logan had told Captain Johnny and his Shawnee warriors at the Limestone parley in 1787 was right, and Boone must have known it. It was much the same as what the U.S. commissioners had told the Seneca chief Cornplanter in 1783: “You are a subdued people. . . . We shall . . . declare to you the condition on which, alone, you can be received into the peace and protection of the United States.”1 Kentucky’s Indian neighbors were still able to mount occasional raids into Kentucky, but they no longer had any prospect of waging a successful war against Kentucky and its tens of thousands of settlers. There was a resurgence of fighting between Indians and whites in the early 1790s, as the U.S. government sought lands north and west of the Ohio River, by diplomacy and by armed force, and as the Indians joined forces in defense of their lands and won impressive victories over General Harmar in 1790 and over General St. Clair in 1791, before being finally beaten at Fallen Timbers in 1794—but the battles were in Ohio, where Indians still had villages. The fighting in Kentucky after 1782 involved only small-scale raids. What was Boone to do with the balance of his life? In 1784 he turned fifty, a considerable age to achieve on the frontier. He bore scars from past wounds. He was heavier than he had been. Many of his longtime colleagues had already died. In 1783, for example, two months after John Floyd was struck down by an Indian bullet, Col. William Preston, who had survived fighting Banastre Tarleton’s rangers in North Carolina in 1781, died at age fifty-three, felled by a stroke while reviewing his county militia.2 Moreover, Kentucky was far different in 1784 than it had been when Boone first hunted in it, one of the only white men in the country, surrounded by game that appeared to be limitless. Now game was scarce, and settlers were plentiful. The 201 Trading and Land Speculation need for Indian fighters had dwindled, in large part because of the efforts and successes of Boone and other frontier leaders. Boone did what many do when they realize they are no longer young and will not live forever: he sought to make money. He tried a variety of means, including surveying and speculating in land, tavern keeping, trading, ginseng gathering, and government contracting. For a time it looked as if Boone would become lastingly rich, but ultimately none of his ventures paid off, and his reverses embittered him. Boone’s longest-lasting efforts related to land. The hope of getting rich by buying and selling land was what drove most settlers west to the frontier, as it had driven the Boones and the Bryans to the Yadkin Valley. Nathan Reid, who in his early twenties at Boonesborough had helped Boone and John Floyd rescue Jemima Boone and the Callaway girls from the Indians, described the kind of hope that he and Floyd (and presumably Boone) had in the 1770s for making a fortune from land in Kentucky: “Frequently have Floyd and I sat down on a log, or at the foot of a tree, and giving a free rein to our heated imaginations, constructed many a glorious castle in the air. We would, on such occasions, contrast the many discomforts that then beset us, with the pleasures of boundless wealth. Spread out before us lay the finest body of land in the world, any quantity of which, with but little exertion, we could make our own. We clearly foresaw that it would not be long before these lands would be justly appreciated, and sought after by thousands. Then we should be rich as we cared to be.”3 The whites’ interest in Kentucky land grew as the Indian threat receded and the Virginia land laws provided a mechanism for resolving conflicting claims to land in Kentucky. By the early 1780s, as one visitor to Kentucky put it, “The spirit of speculation was flowing in such a torrent that it would bear down every weak obstacle that stood in its way.”4 William Preston’s nephew John Breckenridge, who was to move to Kentucky and become attorney general and speaker of the House there before being elected to the U.S. Senate, in 1786 wrote, “Kentucky is the greatest field for Speculation, I believe, in the World.”5 Boone had...

Share