Lewis and the boats move down the Ohio towards Louisville where Clark is expecting his arrival. At a small settlement in present Trimble County, the nephew of Daniel Boone shares news of his family with Thomas Rodney.[1]Due to a gap in Lewis’s journal, he cannot be precisely located on this date. It is doubtful that Lewis met with Boone’s nephew, but Rodney may have shared his encounter with Lewis and … Continue reading
Visiting the Pryors
As we akord [anchored] in the evening near to a settlement I went on shore while the rest were cooking. A Mr. Pryor and his wife from near Richmond, Virginia, and their nine children, 4 girls and five boys lived there; and there was a nephew to D. Boon and his wife there who had come to see them. Pryor told me had lived there five years, that it is 25 miles below Kentucky River and 35 above Louisville, and that there are but few settlements till we git within ten miles of Louisville.
—Thomas Rodney, 12 October 1803[2]Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick, ed., A Journey Through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 117.
News of Daniel Boone
Daniel Boone, 1820
By Chester Harding (1792–1866
Oil on canvas. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, NPG.2015.102.
Boon told me that his Unkle Daniel, who is remarkable for having lived on Kentucky River long before it was settled by whites, has removed on the west side of the Misisipi and lives 40 miles up the Misouri; that he and his wife in coming here last night were belated and obliged to lodge in the wilderness all night without fire and her horse had mired by the river side and had thrown her in the river so that both had like to have been lost.
—Thomas Rodney, 12 October 1803[3]Ibid.
Surprisingly, neither Lewis nor Clark make any mention of Daniel Boone.
At Boone’s Settlement (May 1804)
We do not know if Lewis crossed paths with Daniel Boone‘s nephew, but the captains were apparently aware of Daniel’s residence near Boone’s Settlement on 23 May 1804.
a fair morning. we Set out 6oClock A. m. and proceeded on verry well. passed Some Inhabitants called boons Settlement.
—Joseph Whitehouse, 23 May 1804
Daniel Boone was sixty-nine years old in 1803, too old to go traipsing out to the Pacific Ocean with the likes of those twenty-something youths of the Corps of Discovery, even if he had been invited. It was clear, however, that Boone would have been precisely the kind of hunter the captains hoped to find for the expedition. See Recruiting the Hunters.
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Notes
| ↑1 | Due to a gap in Lewis’s journal, he cannot be precisely located on this date. It is doubtful that Lewis met with Boone’s nephew, but Rodney may have shared his encounter with Lewis and Clark at the Falls of the Ohio. |
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| ↑2 | Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick, ed., A Journey Through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 117. |
| ↑3 | Ibid. |
