Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road

In March of seventeen seventy-five, a forty-year-old frontiersman named Daniel Boone was hired by Virginia land speculator Richard Henderson to cut a road through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky. Henderson had purchased the land from the Cherokee at the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, a transaction of dubious legality, since the Crown prohibited private land purchases from Native nations, and since the Shawnee, who also used the territory, were not party to the deal. None of that stopped Boone.

He left the Long Island of the Holston River, in what is now northeastern Tennessee, on March tenth, seventeen seventy-five, with about thirty axemen. Over the next three weeks, they hacked a trace through the southern Appalachians, threaded the Cumberland Gap at just over sixteen hundred feet elevation, and pressed northwest into the Kentucky interior. Shawnee raiding parties attacked the party twice, killing two men on the first assault.

Boone kept moving. The Wilderness Road they opened became the primary artery of westward migration for the next generation. Between seventeen seventy-five and eighteen hundred, historians estimate that between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand people traveled it, more than any other overland route in early American history.

By eighteen hundred, Kentucky had more than two hundred thousand residents, making it one of the most populous states in the Union. Boone himself became legend almost immediately, partly because of his own accounts and partly because of John Filson's seventeen eighty-four pamphlet, which put a romantic autobiography in Boone's mouth and circulated it across the Atlantic. Lord Byron referenced him in Don Juan.

The real Boone died in eighteen twenty in Missouri, having lost most of his Kentucky land to legal disputes over faulty title claims, a victim of the very speculation economy he had opened the door for. The road outlasted everything he built.