I heard from my grandfather, who evidently had heard it from the Neals who preceded him, that his family had begun in Pennsylvania and had traveled west with Daniel Boone. Boone was born in the Reading, Pennsylvania, area in 1734 or 1735 and arrived in Kentucky by way of North Carolina. There is also family lore that the Neals intermarried with the Boones. Since we know only a limited amount about Edward Neal's origins and route to Kentucky, the evidence at hand will never enable us to prove or disprove this tradition within the Neal family, but it seems useful to consider this tradition closely for what it might tell us.
It must be said that certain traditions are so commonly found in family history accounts that they almost take on the character of urban legends, difficult to track down and prove – or disprove. Such traditions include "Three brothers came to America" and "One of our ancestors lived to be 115 years old." Among those who migrated from the East into Kentucky, one common tradition is "Our family traveled to Kentucky with Daniel Boone."
Traditions like these enrich a family's history, but we must be wary when we encounter one of them. This is not to say that such traditions should be discarded out of hand: I am convinced that a family's oral tradition is a very valuable clue about its history. But that oral tradition must be tested against what else we know, about the family and about the specific subject, to see if it seems plausible. That is what we must do with the tradition that the Neals traveled with Daniel Boone.
After having studied Boone's life, I am inclined to doubt the tradition. Although it was usual for several families to migrate in a body (as we have seen with the Starks and the Vineyards, for example), the Boones traveled essentially as a single family unit. In addition, one of Daniel Boone's peculiarities is that he moved from place to place too often to get very well acquainted with other people and evidently preferred the solitude of traveling alone. For these reasons it seems unlikely that anyone actually – traveled with – the Boone family or its most famous member.
It could be possible, however, that the Neals followed a similar path to Kentucky, perhaps at about the same time, and perhaps even as part of a larger group that gravitated from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Kentucky in rough proximity to (or on the heels of) the Boones. Looking at the history of the Boones and their migration thus may give us a broad sense of how the Neal family might have made their way from Pennsylvania to Kentucky.
In 1750, the Boone family, including young Daniel, journeyed westward in Pennsylvania to Harrisburg, then south along the valleys on the Carolina or Great Wagon Road (now U.S. 11).1 They forded the Potomac River at Williamsport, Maryland, and followed the Valley of Virginia southward all the way to North Carolina. While passing through the Shenandoah Valley, the Boones encountered the Bryan family, the family of Daniel's wife Rebecca. By the early 1750s the Boones were living at the fork of the Yadkin River in Rowan County, North Carolina. Daniel Boone was exploring in Kentucky by the late 1760s and was there again in 1770.
Reports of the fertility of Kentucky land circulated widely in the East, and there was a surge of "Kentucky fever" there in 1772 and 1773. Accompanying this was combined unhappiness in most of the colonies over the taxes and fees that governments in the far-off eastern portions of these colonies seemed to be imposing on the western sections. Land speculation, too, was a strong motivating factor in driving people further west – which frequently meant south and then west, as we have seen. Successive waves of migration had begun to fill the valleys of Virginia and the farmland of the western Carolinas. All of these factors, plus Americans' seemingly endemic wanderlust, were impelling people just east of the frontier to move beyond it. During the 1770s, pressure to move west was building behind the leading edge of civilization.
During the fall of 1773 Daniel Boone led about forty or fifty persons to Kentucky in the first serious attempt at permanent settlement of the area. I found no reference to Neals being part of this group, which was largely though not entirely composed of Boone's own relatives. There were additional settlements in Kentucky in 1775, as we have seen (including Harrodsburg and Boonsboro), and in 1779 Boone recruited still more settlers in the Yadkin area. It is possible that Neals were in this group instead, but many of these pioneers died or retreated to North Carolina and Virginia after failing to make a go of it in Kentucky or because of renewed Indian attacks.2 One of Boone's characteristics is that he himself moved from place to place too often to get very well acquainted with other people, and it seems unlikely that anyone actually "traveled with" him. There is no evidence, therefore, to link the Neals' arrival in Kentucky to Daniel Boone's arrival there.
Movement into Kentucky swelled during the 1780s. Much of the migration passed through the Cumberland Gap, where a single opening allows the crossing of some otherwise-formidable mountains and the traveler finds himself, once the last mountain range has fallen away, in central Kentucky. By the 1790s, travel through Pennsylvania and down the water routes had begun to predominate. Surprisingly, Boone became involved in this process not by guiding newcomers through the mountains but by serving their needs upon arrival: by 1783, he was operating a combination inn, tavern, supply store, and wharf on the Ohio River at Limestone, Kentucky, just down the river a bit from the mouth of Limestone Creek. This is the town that would be renamed Maysville in 1786.
A very small town when Boone lived there, Limestone/Maysville was one of the main disembarking points (along with Louisville) for those settlers who came the 400 miles down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh and then took the overland route – an old buffalo trace sometimes called the Maysville Road or the Limestone Road – on to Lexington and other points in the Bluegrass region. Boone also surveyed and served as a land hunter, locating good land for others. He moved from Maysville, first (in 1789) eastward into what is now West Virginia and then, in 1799, on to Missouri.
An estimated 12,000 persons landed at Limestone Creek between 1786 and 1789 alone. Had the Neals been among the growing number of emigrants after the American Revolution who went directly from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, they might have floated down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh on flatboats (as the Starks, Vineyards, and possibly other families related to the Neals did) before heading inland in Kentucky. The Neals might have landed at the Boone establishment, provisioned at his store, drunk his liquor, or stayed at his inn. Boone might even have helped to find or survey the Neal land (assuming they were not just squatting).
Unfortunately for family tradition (and, perhaps, family pride), research now indicates that the Neals to whom we connect went from (probably) Pennsylvania to western Virginia to South Carolina and only then to Kentucky. Daniel Boone did not figure in this migration. How, then, do we account for the tradition that the Neals "traveled with Daniel Boone"?
One answer is that there are Boones besides Daniel we should consider. Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, arrived in Indiana from Kentucky in 1802, and from 1806 until his death in 1816 he ran a mill on the public road in Indiana twenty-five miles west of Louisville. Squire Boone had lived in Camden District in South Carolina when Matthew McCammon was residing there. Since we now believe that the Neals also lived there at that time, we can hypothesize a link between the Neal and Boone families. Possibly the Neals even accompanied Squire Boone across the mountains into Kentucky, and this kernel of reality, repeated and burnished and transformed over the generations, gave rise to the family story that the Neals "traveled with Daniel Boone." In addition, a Ratliffe Boon, a cousin of Daniel (and later a governor of Indiana), moved from Kentucky to Indiana in 1809, about the time the Neals made their move. Perhaps the Neals moved a portion of the way with Ratliffe Boon and he became transformed into Daniel Boone as the story got retold over the decades.
Establishing just when and where the Neals might have known the Boone family continues to elude us, then. Family lore often transforms the truth as it gets told and retold over generations farther and farther removed from personal knowledge of the events. We can only wonder what truth lies at the bottom of this interesting story that we traveled with Daniel Boone.
Turning to the tradition that Neals and Boones were intermarried, we find better information. In fact, the McCammon family did intermarry with the Boones, as did the Cowden family. There is some disagreement over the exact nature of the former family's connections with the Boones,3 but the Cowden connection is clearer: Elizabeth {Cowden} Neal's sister Henrietta married a direct descendant of Daniel himself. Could it be that the Neal family lore about the relationship to Boone has actually come to us from the McCammon or (more likely) Cowden family, which did travel to Kentucky with Boone? (The Cowdens evidently lived in North Carolina, as we have seen.)
It is also possible, I suppose, that knowledge of this tie by marriage between the Neals and the Boones gave rise to the tradition that Neals had traveled to Kentucky with him, but we have now reached the point where we cannot separate legend and history.
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rev. 7/11/08
Notes
1Sometimes called the Philadelphia Road because it ultimately led there. Return to text
2A list of the earliest (1773-1775) settlers of Kentucky includes no men named Neal, although there is a William Deal among them. This list is hardly complete, for about half of those known to have arrived in Kentucky by then cannot be identified by name. We know from a later court case that a Benjamin Neel lived in the St. Asalph area before 1780. Return to text
3One source states that Jane {McCammon} Neal's sister Elizabeth married Daniel's nephew, George. Another source describes George as Daniel's full cousin. Return to text
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