Life of a Longhunter

by Naomi Musch

There have always been wanderers, those curious and hardy souls who aren’t content remaining near the hearth, but find their calling in traversing the wild, in exploring the unknown, in finding their prospects in raw and solitary pursuits. In the early days of the settling of America, there were the explorers, then the trappers and fur traders, the voyageurs, and the longhunters.

I have to admit, I’m drawn to the romanticism of these types of characters. (Think Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans.) Yet, while we enjoy visualizing the romantic hero of the woods, we ought to understand the reality of the kinds of existence the wilderness wanderers lived. While history tells us there were men with fine character, cleanliness, and noble intentions, some hunters or traders of the era were also likely brutal, vulgar, and downright uncouth. (It would be pretty tough to mind personal hygiene while meandering the wild, and so much time alone lends a man to adjusting his standard of morality, usually toward the bad.)

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, Simon and Schuster

Let’s take a couple of minutes to think about the actual lifestyle of a longhunter in the late 18^th century. The longhunters were mostly men who came to the frontier from Virginia and other southwest corners of the colonies and headed through the gap into Kentucky, Tennessee, and even as far as Illinois. They didn’t set out on the frontier with the purpose of settlement, but because they both preferred the lifestyle of self-rule and, mostly, because they hoped to make a profit. The name longhunter came from the fact that rather than heading into the forests for short durations to hunt or trap, they set out for periods as long as six months at a stretch, returning home with a bounty that would pay more than their farms might provide in a year’s time.

Yes, they did come home. They settled down between seasons. They might farm some, but they made the bulk of their income bringing in hides and meat--usually for the companies that hired them. While they were at it, the longhunters became well acquainted with the land west of the mountains itself—such as Daniel Boone did—and later on used this information to make land claims or to hire themselves out as guides to settlers seeking to move west.

The longhunters didn’t usually operate solo. Working for hire, they traveled in large groups for mutual protection in the face of trouble. Daniel Boone was himself robbed on three different occasions. Picture a camp of twenty or more men…each day bringing in more kills…some men having packs of hunting dogs and as many as three to eight pack horses each for carrying their meat, hides, and equipment. But these dogs and horses needed food and care besides. The hunters would flesh out their hides, salt and pack meat, and toss leftover carcasses to their dogs. The camp would be inundated with unsavory smells from souring meat to clothes, grease, and general human filth besides. Hardly the image of a romantic tale! And the men occasionally suffered great hardship too. There were times they couldn’t build a fire, and the cold and damp seeped into their bones. Sometimes the hunting was meager and so was food. Illness and injury had to be taken care of only by the skill of fellow hunters. Sometimes death met them in the woods.

Longhunter with a Dead Deer

Nevertheless, despite the extraordinary way they lived—or perhaps because of it—we enjoy the stories of these wanderers. Not unlike travelers returning home from a far journey today, I’m sure the longhunters made joyful preparations as they returned to their homesteads to see their families again. They likely stopped to bathe and groom themselves, and perhaps they brought their wives and children some trinkets gotten in trade. Then they would settle in for a period of domesticity before restocking their supplies and saying their goodbyes for another season.

I remain enamored of the stories of the fur traders and hunters and trappers. Of the rendezvous, the settlements, and forts in the wilderness. This coming January, my novel Song for the Hunter will release, and I hope you’ll join me living for a while as a wanderer in the wilderness…from the comfort of your home in the pages of a book. Add it to your Goodreads want-to-read list, or pre-order it today:

 Song for the Hunter by Naomi Musch

Happy wandering!

Naomi

https://naomimusch.com/

The Longhunters

One cannot read colonial-era stories for long without finding mention of the longhunters—or long hunters, depending upon the writer. But just who were these people?

Only known portrait of Daniel Boone during his lifetime (1820)

The era of the longhunter probably starts with the expedition led by Dr. Thomas Walker in 1750 along the frontier of Virginia, into what is now Tennessee and Kentucky by way of Cumberland Gap, who reported on a land of unbelievable richness, with buffalo and beaver and all kinds of other game whose hides and pelts brought a great deal of money out East, and in trade to England. It wasn’t long before various parties of men followed, venturing into the wilderness for “long hunts”—expeditions that, like Walker’s, could last from several months to more than a year. The most famous of the hardy (some might say foolhardy) men who set out on these hunts was Daniel Boone, but he was by no means the only one.

The era reached its peak during the 1760’s. Up until that time, politics between France and England, and resistance from native tribes, kept most from venturing west. Tensions were bad enough during the French and Indian War, and at the close of that conflict in 1763, King George made it essentially illegal to hunt west of the Appalachians without a trading license. The vast majority of hunters ignored his proclamation. One accounts says that Daniel Boone himself did not make his first trip west until 1769, after a visit by English trader John Finley, but others say his first long hunt was in 1750. I'm inclined to believe the latter. Boone’s adventures included capture by the Cherokee and Shawnee, having his pelts confiscated, probable adoption as a native, returning home after so long that his wife had given him up for dead, and the later loss of a son to Indian attack. None of this deterred him from making the hunting grounds his eventual home, and persuading others to join him there.

Other notable longhunters included James Harrod (for whom Harrodsburg, KY is named), Simon Kenton, Elisha Walden (also called Wallen/Walling, for whom Wallen’s Ridge at Cumberland Gap is named), Abraham and Isaac Bledsoe (yes, from the same real-life family I used in both Defending Truth and The Cumberland Bride), and Benjamin Cutbirth (almost certainly a mispronunciation and subsequent mispelling of Cuthbert).

1852 painting of Squire Boone Crossing the mountains

By the time the American Revolution ended, the heyday of the longhunter had passed. The unbelievable abundance of game across Kentucky and Tennessee had thinned considerably, probably less by hunting than pushed westward by the rising tide of settlers. And so the explorers and adventurers went further west, as well. In the process, the Boones and Bledsoes left a trail across Tennessee and into central Missouri of both place names and descendants.

More reading:

William Blevins, Long Hunter
Daniel Boone (and at Wiki)
Simon Kenton
Longhunters (at Wiki)
Bledsoe's Station in Tennessee

The Wilderness Road and Cumberland Gap

Travel during colonial times was notoriously slow and arduous. I've written before about the Great Wagon Road stretching from Philadelphia down through western Virginia and into North Carolina, which had its origins as the Warrior’s Path, a highway of sorts between the northern and southern native tribes. The Wilderness Road, stretching from western Virginia, down into east Tennessee and up into Kentucky, had similar origins. Traffic between the upper Ohio Valley and the lower Appalachians traced a path down through the heart of the region famed as a favored native hunting ground, converging with the Warrior’s Path at the great Cherokee town of Chota, in southern Tennessee. Interestingly enough, that western trail was called Athawominee, “Path of the Armed Ones,” essentially a variation of Warrior’s Path like the one up through the Shenandoah Valley.

The first European recorded as having seen Kentucky and the Ohio Valley is Gabriel Arthur, a white indentured servant taken captive after an expedition gone badly during 1673. Directed by the Shawnee down the well-marked path that took him south to the Cumberland Mountains and eventually through Cumberland Gap then back northeast to Fort Henry (near present-day Petersburg, Virginia). No one at that time realized the significance of what Arthur had been shown, the best route over the Appalachian Mountains to the western frontier.

The area remained unexplored until 1750, when Dr. Thomas Walker mounted an expedition into what was then western Virginia, which in colonial times extended all the way to the Mississippi River. Others followed, including Daniel Boone and James Harrod, initially traveling companions but separating after a difference of opinion, and both with Kentucky towns named after them. Employed by the Transylvania Company to blaze the way for a road northward from Cumberland Gap, Boone led a company of thirty-some mounted and armed axmen in 1775. He and other longhunters had already been exploring this region for a decade and more, but he’s the one credited with first leading settlers over the pass called Cave Gap in the early days, and up into the lush, wild country called Kentucky.

Many early explorers wrote of their journeys, describing herds of bison, elk, and deer, flocks of turkeys and geese, rivers full of fish, canebrakes taller than a mounted man’s head, and tangled thickets of holly and laurel that afforded little grazing for the horses that carried them and their provisions. Bear and wolves ranged freely, drawn by the plentiful game. While hunting was easier than they’d ever dreamed possible, the land itself was poor for farming on the eastern side of the region. They wrote of the mountains and caves, of stream crossings complicated by sand and mud flats. More fearsome were Indian warriors, who often struck parties of explorers and later settlers without warning, taking captives and scalps and leaving terror in their wake.

And still, the settlers came, pouring over the Cumberland Gap on foot and by horseback long before the way was fit for wagon traffic. Some went north to the lower Ohio River Valley, via Boone’s Trace, as it was called, since travel down the Ohio was still too hazardous, made so by native tribes and white outlaws. Others went westward along Harrod’s Trace. In 1796, work was completed on an actual wagon road, commissioned a year or so before by the newly formed Kentucky legislature. There’s evidence that improvements began about 1780, with completion not taking place until after Kentucky gained statehood, but other sources say most improvements happened around 1792, with official work and opening in 1796. The latter is the timeline I used in my upcoming novel, The Cumberland Bride.

By the end of the colonial era, Westward Expansion was already well in motion, thanks to the Wilderness Road. Today, modern highways and interstates roughly trace the route, and a mountain tunnel eases traffic across the Cumberland Gap. The forests still look as wild, though, in between scattered towns that dimly recall their origins, and historic markers and sites bearing witness of the amazing journeys of those explorers, hunters, and settlers.