Early Fall 2007

Hello Friends —

The last time I checked in with you, Tom and I were headed off on a field trip. We were going to do research on an historical novel idea I've been working on for a good long while. I love writing about the frontier experience because the struggle to move west and establishing a home is a quintessential American story. It’s an experience that calls out the best and worst in the men and women who "go where no man has gone before." And it gives me the opportunity to write some dramatic and fascinating fiction.

I especially like the stories that come out of Kentucky. Because Daniel Boone embodies the very essence of the Kentucky frontiersman, I chose the guide IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DANIEL BOONE as our main resource in exploring this part of the country. Following the trail the author Randall Jones laid out for us, we started our tour in Mocksville, North Carolina, where the Boone family settled when Daniel was a young man.

After driving past it several times, we discovered, in a shady grove a few hundred feet back from a busy highway the site of the Joppa Meeting House. This is where the Boone family worshiped, where Daniel’s parents are buried, and where Daniel may or may not have met and married his wife Rebecca Bryan.

The meeting house itself no longer exists (although I've seen pictures of it), but to this day you can see its footprint left in the soil. You can see where the door must have been, where pioneer families would have greeted each other on Sunday mornings two-hundred and fifty years ago. Squire and Sarah Boone’s graves are marked slightly to the front and right of where the building stood in the stone-fenced graveyard. It is a peaceful place, and yet, events from long ago seemed to still be whispering in the trees and rising up from the earth beneath our feet.

In the same area, we visited the sites of several of Daniel and Rebecca’s cabins. Unfortunately, no sign of them exists today. That is because it was common practice for neighbors to dismantle the cabin and reuse logs and stones once the family who'd occupied it had moved on. As a result I ended up taking endless pictures of empty fields that have inevitably reverted to climax plants.

Many of the places are down dusty roads, in sparsely settled areas even now. How much lonelier and more remote those cabins must have been when the men were off hunting or cutting trees to clear the land. Or when Indians were raiding.

The only cabin we visited where the Boones actually lived has been reconstructed in an historic park overlooking the Holston River in Kingsport, Tennessee. It is a sturdy cabin with the feel and smell of great age about it. As I looked at it, I found it hard to imagine a family that included eight of the Boone’s own children, as well as the assorted nieces and nephews who lived with Daniel and Rebecca from time to time, sharing such a tiny space. Still, laying my hands on logs and the stones of the ancient fireplace, I felt a tingle of connection to a time far distant from my own.

Next, we followed Boone west along what came to be known as the Wilderness Road. We stopped near Walden’s Creek, where Boone’s oldest son Israel was tortured and killed by Indians in 1773 during Daniel’s first aborted attempt to lead settlers to Kentucky. It was hard to imagine such brutality happening in such a pristine little valley where cows grazed in fields of swaying buttercups. Somehow more than two hundred years have erased the forests that once grew thick along that creek — and the dangers that lurked in the shadows of those trees.

On our quest to walk in Daniel Boone’s footsteps, and in the footsteps of the estimated 300,000 pioneers who followed Daniel Boone west, we climbed the trail that led through the Cumberland Gap. The "road," as you will see in this photograph, is little more than a path through the woods, up the side of watercourses, and between stands of stones. Whole families followed it barefoot with all their worldly goods strapped on the back of their pack animals. In places, the path is worn nearly knee-deep by the passage of men, women, and children headed for the promised land. I look at the path winding through the woods, think about the hardships they faced, and wonder at their courage.

We continued through the gap following what was also known as Boone’s Trace west and north to Boonesborough, which is Boone’s first settlement in the "promised land." Built slightly east and uphill from the original site on the bank of the Kentucky River, there is an excellent (if rather pristine) reconstruction of the fort. Built of logs, the exterior is made of closely spaced cabins with log palisades set between them. This is what kept Boones and his comrades from capture when Boonesborough came under siege by the British and Indians in 1778. In the center of the large rectangular palisade lies the common ground. In this area is a blacksmith’s shop, powder magazine, and a few small garden plots.

From there, we moved on to the Lexington area looking for two other settlements the Boone and Bryan families founded in the late 1770's. The historical marker for Bryan’s Station is down a picturesque tree-lined road and at the edge of a fast-flowing stream. There wasn't much more than the marker to note its passing, but we stood for a time watching the grooms in the white-fenced fields across the road lead small groups of thoroughbreds out for a little exercise.

The site of Boone’s Station was not far from Bryan’s Station as the crow flies. It’s in a hilly field sandwiched between a couple of modern houses and the remnants of an old farm. The area appears to be a historic site in the making. There is a building (locked when we were there) that appears to be some sort of meeting house or small museum. There were several historic markers set into the center of the field above what must have been the fort’s spring. In the same field was a memorial to Daniel’s brother Ned.

According to the stories I read before we made the trip, Ned looked a great deal like Daniel; alike enough that the Indians killed Ned thinking he was the Great Warrior Boone. The Indians were so delighted they decapitated poor Ned and took his head back to their camps to prove they killed their frontier nemesis.

The conclusion I came to after we made the trip to Kentucky, is that there are lots of things that would make for a good story. My challenge now is to choose, sit down, and start writing.

You can bet I'll keep you posted on my progress.

My best,

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