Jere" Kingsbury by Warren Taylor Kingsbury of Scottsdale, AZ Provided by Clea Mefford of Meridian, ID
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Excerpts from a book on "Jere" Kingsbury by Warren Taylor Kingsbury of Scottsdale, AZ Provided by Clea Mefford of Meridian, ID: The Promised Land and Its Lure What was the "Promise" of the Boonslick Country which led Jeremiah Kingsbury and his family in the spring of 1817 to make the arduous trek from Randolph County, North Carolina, through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, then over the Wilderness Trail to St. Louis and from there, northward up the Boonslick Trail, which paralleled the winding Missouri River to their destination of Fort Hempstead in Howard County. Jeremiah, or Jere Kingsbury as he came to be called, had been born in Boonnville, New York December 5th, 1784. He was of the sixth generation of the Joseph Kingsbury who came to Massachusetts, from England in 1630. Jere made his way to Randolph County, North Carolina, where he spent a number of years, selling dry goods and other merchantable articles. In December 1811 he married Elizabeth Scotten. A son, Horace, was born April 7,1813; a second son, Noah, on August 4,1815. Jere, his wife and the two small children moved to Howard County, Missouri in 1817. Upon their arrival, they spent their first winter in Fort Hempstead. From what little we know of Jere's years in North Carolina, he had established himself as a successful merchant. Why then did he pull up stakes and venture forth into an area where most settlers were still living in the stockade forts erected to protect themselves from assaults of the Indian tribes allied with the British in the War of 1812? A Conjecture We can only conjecture. The basis for mine is an untitled unpublished manuscript of my Uncle Lilburn Adkin Kingsbury (1884 to 1983), a Great-grandson of Jere. It is a carefully annotated story of the early days of the Boonslick Country and some of its pioneer people. It was written in 1942 when my hobbyhorse riding uncle mounted his "History Hobbyhorse" and rode off, searching out the history of the area and its people - especially his relatives and their southern-shaped way of life. (For reference purposes I have labeled it "Boonslick Country.") In this manuscript, Lilburn pictures the Boonslick Country and its pioneers through the eyes of some of its early visitors. I share these impressions with you. John Bradbury's Visit It was November 1811. The eminent English naturalist, John Bradbury, who had gone up the Missouri River to study the plant life of the region, was on his return trip. Coming down the river, he and other members of his expedition were eager for the sight of other white men who might have news of the outside world. "About noon," he recorded in his diary, "We came in sight of a white man's house at Boon's Lick, and our boatmen immediately set up a shout. Soon after, some men appeared at the edge of a field of Indian corn close to the river; they invited us ashore and we willingly complied. In passing through the corn, I was much struck with its luxuriousness; I judged it to be not less than fourteen feet high and the ears were far above my head. "It was Sunday and when we arrived at the home, we found three women there all dressed in clean, white gowns, and being in other respects very neat; they formed a pleasing contrast to the squaws whom we had of late been in the habit of seeing. They soon spread the table for us and produced bread, milk and preserved fruits, which I thought the most delicious I had ever tasted." Their Boonslick hosts regaled them not only with food, but imparted momentous news. The issues between the United States and Britain were strained and promised to lead to war. British agents in the Indian Territory were reported to be inciting the Indians to hostilities against the white people. And the faces of these settlers became serious with apprehension as they told Bradbury of the Indian peril at their own door. When they had come to this country they had found Indians. They had treated them with kindness, had even fed them hospitably, in a sincere effort to keep them friendly. But in spite of their solicitous overtures, the attitude of the natives had grown more hostile until now trouble was imminent. The Boonslick frontiersmen were laying aside all individual plans for the immediate future and were pooling their resources in an effort to build common shelters for the protection of themselves and their property. Boonslick Forts At three strategic points on the north side of the Missouri River, they built Forts Cooper, Kincaid and Hempstead, each a group of log cabins placed closely together and enclosed by a log stockade. The site of Fort Cooper was about two miles south of Boonslick, where the Boone brothers had made salt and from which this section of the country got its name, and (on the north side of the river) a like distance east of present day Arrow Rock. The other two forts were twelve miles down the river and within a mile and a half of each other. These forts were modeled after those the settlers had known in Kentucky: They were shaped as parallelograms enclosing about an acre of land. A trench was then dug, four or five feet deep, and contiguous pickets planted in it, so as to form a compact wall ten or twelve feet above the ground. The pickets were of hard and durable timber, nearly a foot in diameter, and formed a rampart beyond the power of man either to leap or overthrow by the exercise of individual and unaided physical power. At the angles were small projecting squares of still stronger material and planking, technically called flankers with oblique port holes, so that the sentinel within could rake the external front of the station without being exposed to a shot. Two folding gates, in the front and rear, swinging on prodigious wooden hinges, gave ingress and egress to the men and teams in time of security. At other times, a trusty sentinel on the roof of an interior building, was stationed so as to be able to see at a distance every suspicious object Each settler corralled his live stock in the fort nearest his land claim and took residence there. The threat the Indians posed brought about a common effort. Fields surrounding the forts were cultivated. with some settlers standing guard, others working the soil with a crude mattock hitched to a horse, and then harrowing it with brush drags. Trace chains of cow hide and plow lines of hemp were common. Sacking pins, sacking needles, and pitch forks were of wood. Harness hades were often made from the crook of an elm tree, and wagon wheels were fashioned by sawing off sections of a log from four to six inches wide. To add to settlers security in the forts, a company was organized in each and the three companies formed a battalion. Thus when war was declared in 1812, an act which definitely increased their peril, they were not without substantial, organized protection. They Stood Their Ground To further insure their safety, they pleaded with the Governor of the Territory, to send troops to the Boonslick frontier, but it was outside the acknowledged jurisdiction of the United States, He replied, "If you want protection, you must move to the strong settlements, haven't men to spare." Col. Benjamin Cooper, the battalion leader, had no thought of abandoning the improvements they had already made on the frontier. He declared indignantly that "that was no way to settle a country, it was not the way the colonies were settled, nor the way he and others had settled Kentucky." His comrades agreed with him. They resolved to stand their ground and save their settlements. In advising Governor Benjamin Howard of their decisions, Cooper wrote: We have maid our homes here & all we have is here & it would ruin us to Leave now. We be good Americans, not a Tory or one of his Pups among us & we have 2 hundred men and boys that will fight to the last and we have 2 hundred Wimen & Girls that will take there places which made a good force. So we can Defend this Settlement. with Gods Help we will do So if we had a flew burls powder & 2 hundred lead is all we ask. During the War, there were many Indian depredations and the people in the forts were put on their mettle. A description of conditions under which they lived, was embodied in resolutions drawn up by Col. Cooper in 1817 and sent to the government in the matter of securing settler's right of preemption of New Madrid claims as follows: "In 1805, the United States government established a Board of Commissioners in Missouri to pass on the Spanish land titles which involved about 1,721,485 arpents (.85 of an acre of land) Although the majority of the titles were clear, many had been incompletely made or were fraudulent. Successive Congressional Acts eventually recognized most of the claims. A series of earthquakes beginning in 1811 rendered untillable much of the land in the New Madrid area. In 1815, Congress issued those certificates to the settlers in this region permitting them to take an equal amount of land anywhere in the Boon's Lick Country. The result was pandemonium. Speculators bought up many of the certificates; swindlers laid false claims. Later it was asserted that there were five times as many New Madrid claims as there had been heads of families in the earthquake area.