The Kentucky Frontier: From Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

Abstract

The American West has fascinated historians and the public for a time. Invariably the images that leap to mind are those of the trans-Mississippi West-nomadic Indian tribes, settlers, and mining camps. During the last decade, however, historians have given new attention to the trans-Appalachian West, the region between the mountains and the Mississippi River where the clash of Native American and white cultures first shaped federal Indian policy, where settlers ignored land laws, and where entrepreneurs viewed the country as a paying proposition. On the trans-Appalachian frontier, the first whites lived little differently from the Indians who had migrated to the region relatively recently. In that borderland between Indian country and established white settlements, Indians and whites sustained themselves with game, traded skins for necessities and luxuries, and moved when and where they pleased. For the Indians the land belonged to no one, and they used it in a communal fashion with clearly understood rules that determined tribal, family, and individual control. The long hunters who first crossed the Appalachians in pursuit of deer and bear for their skins, and later the families that trailed after them, also considered the land free for the taking, but applied a different cultural concept to land use-ownership by right of possession, that is occupation. In time, others followed who considered land ownership a matter of purchase. This last concept made no accommodation for either Indians or the frontier people. As a result, the clash of cultures for control of the trans-Appalachian frontier involved not only conflict between Indians and whites, but also between classes, that is, between the frontier people and the speculators/businessmen who wrested the land from both Indians and whites for their own commercial