Pioneers moved to the state from turn of century to 1800

Daniel Morgan Boone, son of Daniel and Rebecca, liked the hunting and the markets for pelts that he had in Missouri - then called Upper Louisiana.

After a few years, he went back to Kentucky to urge his dad to move.

Daniel Boone drug his feet: "I’m 65 years old and can’t do long hunts as I once did."

In Kentucky, where Boone had been a hero for 20 years, he was suddenly the hated man - the surveyor who decided lawsuits on land disputes. In each suit, someone would lose. The state was putting thousands of Boone’s acres up for sale for taxes. At the same time, he was being honored by having a county named Boone.

Boone responded by cutting a large tulip poplar tree and making a dugout canoe 60 feet long, capable of carrying 5 tons! They moved livestock on foot and essential possessions from Kentucky to Missouri just as the calendar changed from 1799 to 1800. They built their usual dirt-floor log cabin west of St. Louis. You can locate that home site on current maps by finding "Daniel Boone Home" on a Missouri map.

Rebecca Boone was my aunt, several generations back, of course. Several other distant relatives came to Missouri on that 800-mile trip! Grandma - Huldah Logan Henry - told of a young mother who rode horseback with a 3-week-old infant in her arms. Brothers Nathan and Morgan Boone knew how to make salt, and that was a good place to find wild animals for food. Where salty water had been "oozing" out of the ground for centuries was also a good place to hide and wait for animals to come for salt. Nathan and Daniel Morgan learned salt-making with their father at Blue Licks in Kentucky.

Morgan Boone was on a hunting trip when he learned the location of this salt spring. In 1805, the brothers visited this lick, across the Missouri River east of Arrow Rock. They came back the next year to build the furnace and a long wooden trough to direct the water from the spring to the kettles on their "furnace."

When salt was ready, it was packed into deer skins - stitched up - or in hollow logs, then sent to the St. Louis market via river keelboat.

Little did they imagine that western travelers would follow their tracks, but the trace or trail of wagons following the Boones’ tracks soon gave the entire area the name Booneslick Country. Various mud conditions caused tracks everywhere, but Boone’s Lick Trail was well-established about 1913.


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