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Boonville Next to a good woman on the farm is a good road to get to the farm. The whole problem of country life is a transportation problem. -Missouri farmer, interviewed near Boon's Lick Road 1 In the summerof 1805, two sons ofDaniel Boone, driven as he had been by restless energy and adventurous spirit, pressed beyond the thin line of civilization along the Mississippi River and into the wilds of what would become central Missouri. Their objective was to find salt, which was both scarce and precious in that remote part of the world. For some months they tramped through the woods alongside unmapped waterways, sometimes following faint paths of the region's Indian occupants, more often cutting their own trail. Well over a hundred miles west of their starting point, the tiny Femme Osage district settlement near St. Charles, young Nathan and Daniel Morgan Boone would find the resources they needed: a series ofsprings so strongly impregnated with salt that deer and other wild animals convened there to drink the waters and lick the salty concentrate off the rocks jutting out of the stream. The Boones boiled the brine from the springs and loaded the salty residue into hollowed-out logs, which they then floated down the Missouri River to St. Louis, where merchants were laying out as much as $250 a hundredweight for good-quality salt. The Boones gave their name to the salt lick and to the overland pathway, Boon's LickTrail, they had created to locate it, and to much else that would need to be named thereabouts. The Boones spelled their name differently; some used the final "e" and some did not. Thus were born Boon's Lick and, eventually, Boonville, situated just outside what would become Boone County, Missouri. Much of the background material in this chapter, as well as the chapter's epigraph, is from a lengthy series of articles published in the Columbia Herald and other newspapers by Walter Williams in 1911, and based on his remarkable travels along the Boon's Lick Road and the Santa Fe Trail. Williams spent several weeks researching this series, retracing the whole of the route from St. Charles to Franklin to Santa Fe. The best source for this, and other matters related to the Boones, is John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend ofan American Pioneer (Henry Holt and Co., 1992). The author is especially grateful to Professor William Foley, a leading authority on Missouri history, for his thoughtful and knowing review of this chapter. 5 6 ACreed for My Profession Each was named with equal authority after the most celebrated pioneer family in America. The Boone brothers were not the first white men to investigate the Missouri wilderness. Before them had come trappers and hunters, even a fort or two. Colonel Benjamin Cooper had led a group of hardy Kentucky rangers on a prolonged exploration of Upper Louisiana, as it was then called, perhaps with a view toward claiming additional territory for their new state. But Kentucky's governor, James Garrard, wearied offinancing the costly venture and sent word to his rangers to return. They brought home with them vivid reports of what they called "The New Eden" of the Missouri territory, tales that would later inspire hopeful Kentuckians and Virginians to pick up stakes and head for the fertile lands to the west. For the most part, the early settlers and the Native American tribes coexisted peaceably. There was, however, some resentment, notably from the Missouri Indians as well as the Fox and Sauk tribes, over the loss oftheir ancient hunting grounds. Raids on the frontier outposts near St. Louis, though infrequent, were nevertheless bloody. The situation worsened in 1812, when war broke out between the United States and Britain. British troops joined forces with the tribes, helpfully supplying weapons to the warriors and goading them into gruesome attacks on the Missouri pioneers. The opposition began to crumble in 1813, with the death of Tecumseh, the great Shawnee chief who led the alliance oftribes, and upon whom the Britishhad conferred the rank ofbrigadier general. Hostilities officially ended in 1815, when representatives of the U.S. government signed a peace treaty at Portage des Sioux. The Native American tribes retreated farther to the west, to lands Europeans did not yet want, and settlers by the thousands began pouring into Missouri Territory. Many of them traveled via the Boon's Lick route, which had been surveyed and mapped by Nathan Boone...

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