Sherry Chandler

A good poor man’s country

From Stephen Arons, How the West Was Lost. The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. The Johns Hopkins Unversity Press, 1996.

A good poor man’s country. The phrase was ubiquitous among the contemporaries of Daniel Boone. Its meaning, however, was ambiguous. Indeed, that ambiguity helps explain why Kentucky did not become one. In its most common usage, the trope referred to a territory where men and the households they headed could get ahead. From the founding of British North America, promoters of settlement recommended various colonies as places where cheap land and high wages allowed Europeans of low stations and slim prospects to advance up social and economic ladders. In the era of the American Revolution, Kentucky became the latest and the most renowned land of opportunity. Tens of thousands of poor men and their families joined Boone in the conquest and colonizaton of trans-Appalachia, propelled by what Michel-Guillaume_Jean de Crèvecoeur described as “the happy restlessness . . . which is constantly urging us all to become better off than we are now.”

East and west of the Appalachians in the eighteenth century, poor men asked more of a good country than material prosperity. What drove pioneers across the mountains in the last quarter of the century was a hunger for lands that would allow families to get by with greater security and less effort. Fertile soil, ample range, and game-filled woods might not produce riches, but they captivated poor men who dreamed of achieving personal independence and providing more easily for dependents and descendants. While men of the backcountry from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas habitually testified to the hardships of border life, they also spoke often of the satisfactons of their simple, yet liberating, ways. Instead of “sigh[ing] for what was out of reach,” remembered one son of the Greater Pennsylvania backcountry, we were “happy and contented with such living, had fewer aches and pains . . . and slept more soundly.” Limiting wants and lending hands to neighbors in need held the key to a good poor man’s country in which how well people got along counted for more than how frequently or how far they got ahead.

That formula Ohio Indians well understood. Indian orators did not employ the metaphor of a good poor man’s country, and colonial writers did not attach the phrase to the Indian country beyond the Appalachians. Yet judged by the security and ease with which people got by and fellow villagers got along, the best poor man’s country belonged to the unconquered Indian peoples. Judge by almost any standard, Ohio Indian country was a better poor woman’s country than the adjacent backcountry. [pp. 192-193]

Arons’s argument is that Boone et al. had a unique opportunity to establish a variety of “new Eden” for the ordinary man. They blew it, not just because of men like Henry Clay who carved out huge estates using exploited slave labor, but because they themselves bought into the notion of land acquisition for wealth and profit. Instead they killed off all the game and lost the land to cannier exploiters. And so it was for the entire westward expansion.

The dear hunt

Whoso List to Hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off, therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”

— Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503-1542)

This is a translation of a Petrarchan sonnet that Wyatt co-opted to refer to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It shows up nearly every year in Poetry Daily’s Poet’s Pick mailings during April. It is a particularly attractive adaption of courtly love’s use of the hunt as a metaphor for courtship. According to Wikipedia,

by the High Middle Ages, the necessity of hunting was transformed into a stylized pastime of the aristocracy. More than a pastime, it was an important arena for social interaction, essential training for war, and a privilege and measurement of nobility.

Here, in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (Henry Holt, 1993), is John Mack Faragher on the tale of Daniel Boone’s fire hunt:

Frontier legend related a different tale of their meeting. On a summer’s eve, the deer congregated at the creeks to avoid the swarms of bothersome mosquitoes and feast on the tender water mosses, young Boone would oftentimes pursue the “fire hunt,” a companion holding a firebrand aloft while he stalked the creek, rifle at the ready. Starting from their feeding and gazing upon the approaching fire, the deer would stand frozen, seemingly hypnotized by the light, the reflected glow cast by their eyes a target for his rifle. On one such occasion, so the tale was told, Rebecca, whose task it was to herd her father’s cows, is out searching for strays when she is overtaken by sudden nightfall. Losing her way in the dark, she strikes a course for home by wading through the shallows of the creek. Suddenly ahead she sees the glow of an approaching torch and the reflection of a rifle barrel. At the same moment Boone levels his piece at the blaze of her eyes but, sensing that these shining orbs are unlike those of any deer he had seen, holds his fire for a crucial second, long enough for Rebecca to bound away in terror through the woods. Boone pursues and finds her trail leading leading to the Bryan homestead. There he meets the panting maiden. Thunderstruck at how near he had come to destroying this woman, whom he immediately knows will become the object of his love, he thereafter gives up firehunting. [pp.43-44]

In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers 1630 – 1860 (Univ North Carolina Press, 1984), Annette Kolodny interprets this fire hunt folk tale thus:

If the fire-hunt legend calls to mind medieval allegories in which the hunting of the hart plays out a lover’s pursuit of his dear, it does so with a difference. In medieval allegories, the hunt begins with a wounding of the hart and terminates with its capture, the symbolic uniting of the lovers thus displacing the prior pursuit. In [Timothy] Flint’s Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone [published 1828], however, the hunting never ceases. The imputed consummation that closes the story does not, in fact, bind Daniel to Rebecca’s side. For Boone’s “darling pursuit of hunting” is not metaphorical: it is his controlling “passion.” The “unexplored paradise of the hunter’s imagination” is the forest here, not the marriage bed. As a result, the Rebecca Bryan of the fire-hunt legend emerges not as a person beloved in her own right but, instead, as a human cipher who has managed, if only briefly, to take on the erotic appeal of the wilderness that defined her husband’s meaning. [p. 87]

But in How the West Was Lost. The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Stephen Aron sees this hunting as a democratizing factor:

For English and Anglo-American gentlement charged with preserving peace and trade with Indians and establishing order over the backcountry, the meetings of hunters exposed the limits of their governance. . . . The problem, it seemed to many gentry authorities, was that backcountry settlers in general, and “hunters” in particular, too closely resembled the Indian peoples whose lands they invaded. According to well-heeled travelers, primitive ways prevailed along a wide arc from the interior of Pennsylvania to the uplands of South Carolina. They especially proliferated where hunting lured inhabitatnts from civilizing pursuits. In the Carolina uplands that were the southern flank of Greater Pennsylvania in the 1760s, the Anglican minister Charles Woodmason confronted a “people of abandon’d Morals and profligate Principles, the lowest Pack of Wretches my eyes ever saw.” Emissaries for church and king recoiled from the near-savage “white Indians” who peopled the backcountry. Residents of the upper Ohio Valley, reported Thomas Gage, the British military commander for North America in 1772, “differ[ed] little from Indians in their manner of life.” They dressed like Indians (or were “half-naked”), comported themselves like Indians, and indiscriminately consorted with one another like Indians. Backcountry settlers, agreed Sir William Johnson, supervisor of Britain’s relations with northern Indians, were “a lawless set of people as fond of independency as” Indians, “and more regardless of government, owing to ignorance, prejudice, democratical principles and their remote situation.”

More disturbing, backcountry people, like adjacent Indian villagers, displayed little respect for their “betters” and no enthusiasm for the schemes of improvers and uplifters.

. . . According to the theory of human developmental history that reigned in the Age of Enlightenment, when backcountry whites hunted, they reverted to the lowest mode of subsistence. True, gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic hunted too. But they went after game for sport, not subsistence, and thus escaped being stigmatized as white Indians. [pp. 13-14]

And so we are back to the Medieval hunt, the one that is for gentlemen only and led the Kings to make “poaching” a death-penalty crime.

Faragher interprets the tale a little differently:

Variants of this folktale circulated widely in the backcountry settlements of frontier America. The story of the hunter who falls in love with his prey is, in fact, common in the folklore of many hunting peoples; the sexual union of hunter and deer-woman was a recurrent motif in the oral culture of American Indians. Its appropriation in the Boone firehunt tale is another example of frontier borrowing and suggests some closer affinities between American and Indian cultures. It also hints at important tensions between frontier men and women. Rebecca is placed in deadly peril by Boone’s pursuit of his occupation. She is saved by the restraint of his passion, and his transformation from hunter to husband is achieved through the renunciation of an aspect of his livelihood. Thus the tale addresses in metaphor certain discontinuities of gender and suggests that men must forsake certain freedoms to achieve union with women. However, while the tale may contain an important cultural truth, Boone descendants protested its biographical inaccuracy. [p. 44]

And so the fire hunt never happened. But frontier Americans needed it to have happened. Who knows why?