Backyard Wilderness Blog

The December Blog page was a little late, causing many to ask where I have been lately.
For the past month I have been some distance away, both in time and space…

In December, while searching for the Cherokee ancestry claimed by my maternal
grandmother from West Virginia, I discovered that in 1745 my fifth great-grandfather
Johannes Mueller, traveled south from Pennsylvania along the Great Wilderness Road
through the Shenandoah Valley and built the first mill, then later a store, near Fincastle,
Virginia, in present day Botetourt County. At that time, Fincastle, located near the New
River on the eastern side of the Allegheny Mountains, was the last stop at the edge of the
great frontier for long hunters, trappers, and settlers to purchase tools, ammunition, and
supplies, and to make any necessary repairs to wagons before they traveled farther west
through Panther Gap into land that later became West Virginia and Kentucky. It was also
a place frequently visited by many Powhatan, Shawnee and Cherokee. In fact, over time
my relatives adopted some of the native ways and were chided for wearing “Indian style”
deerskin clothing when visited by friends and relatives from Pennsylvania in 1752.
Johannes Mueller, later Anglicized to John Miller, had a cousin, Henry Miller, living nearby,
who built the first iron works and eventually became a wealthy man. As a boy back in
Pennsylvania, Henry had been apprenticed to a blacksmith named Squire Boone.
During the eight years he spent learning his trade, he became best friends with Mr. Boone’s
son, the infamous Daniel, and they shared many adventures together in the wilderness
of western Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Toward the end of the 1750's in southwestern Virginia, there was hostility between the settlers living along the New River and the Cherokee, prompting John Miller and wife Maria to move farther south into North Carolina. They eventually settled at the junction of Muddy Creek and the Yadkin River in present day Clemmons. Coincidentally, a few years earlier, Squire Boone and his family had migrated to this same area from Pennsylvania, settling on land across the river on the opposite bank of the Yadkin. Here, Daniel Boone later met his future bride, Rebecca Bryan.
It was exciting to learn that members of my family were so closely connected to the Boones! Continuing this genealogical search, I finally discovered that Johannes Mueller’s grandson, John “Slickhead” Miller, (my third great-grandfather,) married a Nancy Henson in Ashe County, NC, daughter of William Henson and Ann Jacobs. Ann was a “Jacobs Indian” or “Jacobs Cherokee,” and thus I found my grandmother's Cherokee great-grandmother.

Knowing of my interest in this time period and our family connection between the Boones and the
Millers, my son gave me a copy of “Boone” by Robert Morgan for Christmas this year. In my lifetime
I have read many books about Daniel Boone, beginning with one published in the Golden Books for
Children series when I was six years old. Most early Boone books were written with the intention of
extolling him as one of the English Colony's, then later America's “larger than life” heroes, which indeed
he was in many ways, but this newest biography, drawing from thousands of documents readily available
in this digital age, is better researched and more objectively written, citing both the strengths and weaknesses,
successes and failures, of this iconic man; revealing him as an imperfect, yet much more believably authentic
person. This book also gives Daniel's wife Rebecca her due, describing the life of toil and hardships endured
by this extremely strong woman while Daniel was off in the woods.

One of the most interesting points in the book for me was a reference to the wild edible plants that were
eaten by early settlers in Kentucky during Boone’s time. “Poke”, (early spring pokeweed shoots,)
“cressy greens,” (pronounced creasy, like the word greasy,) and mustard greens were most
frequently consumed. It was fascinating to see that this list was identical to one I made in 2007 while
interviewing an eighty year old woman in North Carolina. As a young girl growing up in rural
south-western Virginia near the Kentucky border, she and her siblings often foraged not only for food,
but for boneset and other medicinal plants they could sell to a local pharmacist to earn money for school
supplies. It was fascinating to hear stories that revealed just how close to nature people still were just
seventy-five years ago. They were not weekend hobby foragers or wild edible enthusiasts, but people still
intimately connected to and dependant upon the land for their well being.