One clarification is in order at this point. Frontier longhunters  hunted in their own regions when game was available. We are not speaking of two separate classes of hunters. The two are indistinguishable, beyond the obvious fact that when a hunter traveled considerable distances from home for weeks and months he was said to have been “a long time hunting,” hence he was then deemed a “longhunter.” All longhunters were hunters, but not all hunters were longhunters.

                                   The Multi-Ethnic Origins of the Frontier Hunter

Given the strongly independent nature of the frontiersman, it is necessary to determine his origins, since his origins likely say something the identity of the hunter and his chosen lifestyle. Like other frontiersmen, he likely came from one of the middle colonies, and their immigrants to Virginia and the Carolina. It is noteworthy that the middle colonies had already defined a distinctive culture and social order that not only precociously anticipated the American future in general, but the frontiersmen in particular. The ethnic diversity that characterized the people settled there, frustrated English expectations of these colonists who proved unresponsive to command.  They were the least prepared to contribute to British conflicts with France, and in time would represent a major obstacle to imperial control of the colonies. Independence and cultural diversity were their defining characteristics. They represented new societies in a world composed of peoples who were openly contentious and disrespectful of British authorities without the violence that characterized Europe during the same time.  Their way of dealing with the British and even later the American political system was to move west to the frontier.

While turning their backs on the dominant British culture of the easterners, the frontiersmen were encouraged by what they saw and learned as the result of the powerful impact upon them by the equally multiethnic Indians on the borderlands. Given the ethnic diversity among its inhabitants, there was no uniform backcountry experience. Hunters, farmers, and white adoptee who chose to live among the Indians, continued to live their lives even as gentry members sought to transplant eastern community and family norms to the frontier, witnessed late 18^th century modifications in gender roles, and participated in the conflict over property rights between settlers, hunters, proprietors, absentee landowners, and the Indians. Even the agrarian society gradually shifted during that time from subsistence to a market-based economy.  Understandably, all of these highly individualistic and independent frontiersmen found unacceptable in the post-Revolution era the efforts of eastern political leaders to tame egalitarian democracy in the interest of “moneyed men.” At the same time, the diversity of these frontiersmen resulted at times in the collusion of destructive violence between themselves and the collision of blending and blurring of their ethnic distinctions. The hunters—sometimes longhunters—did not escape the conflicts of the frontier by running further away on treks, but were participants with others in shaping the new culture of American’s frontier.

One of the numerous areas in which imperial and colonial policies collided with those of the back-country people was the Indian trade. Traders on behalf of empires of commerce subverted traditional Indian culture and economic autonomy and engendered dependency upon European goods, eventually leading to the dispossession of Indian lands. Hunters among the frontiersmen carried on their own trade with far less detrimental consequences for the Indians and in some cases made for more positive and safer relations on a mutually created  “middle ground.” The trade functioned as an intercultural medium of exchange that bound Indians and backcountry people together in such a way as to significantly modify their respective cultures, but minus the exploitive imperial commercial track.

                                               Cultural Convergence in Hunting

Especially during the last four decades of the 18^th century, Indian groups and Euamerican peoples exchanged, not simply trade goods, but varied combinations of hunting, herding, and farming. In their joint occupancy of the frontier, inhabitants experienced a mixed and mixed-up world where frontier cultures coincided and collided. Perhaps most striking was the crossover of cultural ways in hunting strategies. The circumstances were ripe for the combination of European technology and tools, and Indian techniques. The earliest settlers entered frontier regions that were target rich in wild game. Most of the newly arrived settlers on the frontier had no skills in stalking, shooting,  dressing and preparing wildlife for food.  It may come as a surprise that many of them did not even own a gun. In some instances, rifles would have been purchased from German and Swiss gunsmiths in eastern Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, but they would have to learn from experienced hunters how to use the long rifle. Many frontiersmen would learn how to hunt from local Indians. As they became more competent in using Indian hunting techniques, wild meat increasingly became a regular part of their dietary intake. By mid-century, hunting had become an important component in the backcountry economy, with subsistence food exchanges forming a vital part of the trade, involving a meeting of hunters, frontiersmen and Indian.

Colonial officials spoke contemptuously of hunting in the backcountry. To them, the democracy- of hunting represented the loss of a prominent badge of a distinctive aristocratic privilege.  They protested that such unregulated hunting on the frontier might jeopardize relations with the Indians who could be offended by such poaching activity on their exclusive domain. There were violent confrontations between Euramerican and Indian hunters during the 1760s in Kentucky and Tennessee, prompting British officials to fear an imminent, escalating border war.

They also deplored British subjects reverting from their civilized ways to the same low stage of society (only barbarism was a  lower classification). They castigated the frontiersmen as indigent, indolent, and insolent “white savages.” Easterners similarly ridiculed the backcountry hunters as “the dregs of human society who spend their time in murdering wild beasts,” rather than in more “civilized pursuits.” Such pursuits, of course, typically involved giving up the rifle and exchanging it for the plow, and  returning to the agrarian practices of eastern society. The elitists saw the frontiersmen as wallowing in the excesses of democracy and leisure. The “one remedy” offered by J. Hector St.  John was that “As long as we keep ourselves busy tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild; it is the case and the food it [hunting] procures that have this strange effect.” He also held that hunting made the woodsmen “ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable,” and that “eating meat...tends to alter their temper.”  Hunters, he claimed, had become “bad people...who have degenerated” into “the most hideous parts of our society,” and have developed “a strange sort of lawless profligacy, the impressions of which are indelible.”

What was observed in one backcountry region of the middle colonies, Virginia, and the Carolinas, was generally true of all.  Itinerant Anglican minister, Charles Woodmason, while preaching in the Carolina backcountry in the late 1760s described the living and behavior of the settlers, mostly Scots-Irish, “as rude or more so than the Savages,” born of pure “indolence and laziness.”  According to Woodmason, they lived in log cabins “like Hogs,” and their filthy children ran “half naked,” as did their women.” To him “the Indians are better Cloathed and Lodged.”  Nor were they any cleaner in terms of morality, since “hundreds live in Concubinage—swapping their Wives as Cattel, and living in a State of Nature, more irregular and unchastely than the Indians.” Nor did Woodmason find their social behavior any better, but were “as rude in their Manners as the Common Savages...firing, hooping, and hallowing like Indians,” to disrupt his religious services. In reference to this disorderly lot, as “they are the lowest Pack of Wretches my Eyes ever saw or that I have met with in these Woods—As Wild as the very Deer.” While these descriptions were true of some people on all frontiers, there were not true of some frontiersmen who  were determined to construct their future and give their children what preceding generations in their families never dreamed of owning for themselves.

                                                  The Frontier Longhunters

Who were the exceptional hunters who went on the long hunt for weeks, months, or perhaps longer? Beginning in the 1760s, there were in the middle colonies, as well as in Virginia and the Carolinas, small numbers of men who hoped for better prospects of hunting in the far backcountry. In order to avoid hunting near the settlers and Indian towns, these men took increasingly long excursions well beyond the Appalachians. Since these long-distance hunters might spend a long time on “the chase,” they acquired the designation of “long hunters.” Colonial bans against hunting in Indian Country proved futile. Even the Proclamation of 1763 forbidding settlers or hunters from crossing the Appalachian crest, as Sir William Johnson acknowledged, could not prevent people determined “not to be confined by any boundaries or limits.”  British and colonial laws against vagrant hunting proved useless since neither money and manpower were available to prevent it. Equally contemptuous of official rulings and Indian rights in the woods, parties of  backwoodsmen gathered in western Virginia each fall of the year for “long hunts” into Kentucky and Tennesee. But one needs to carefully distinguish between Longhunters who hunted on occasion (perhaps once a year or so) and those who regularly and wastefully hunted herds of animals without bounds.

Like traders and adventurers, many longhunters also served as agents for land companies or themselves. Naturally, other settlers followed them into the same backcountry regions, eager to be “getting land for taking it up.”  This meant that they could acquire simple-fee title to a tract of land on the basis of occupancy and agricultural improvement. During the worst of “Indian times” on the revolutionary frontier, wild meat sustained them and was the staple of colonization in the west. During that period, new settlers were often dependent upon the hunters to lead and to feed them. By living “on their guns,” the importance of hunters inflated the local prestige and authority of the best of them. One Kentucky frontiersman recalled in later years that “to be a brave, skillful warrior and a good hunter was the greatest honor to which any man could attain.”  The pro-tection and provisions of the hunters was especially acute in times of Indian raids when settlers were collected in “settlers’ forts” or “stations.”

Little record has been preserved of the psychological trauma that hunters (like go-betweens and other travelers) suffered when they lost their way “in the woods.” Some Pennsylvania Indians acknowledged that some of their own had gotten lost while hunting.  In cases where people were

negatively affected by the excessive time and circumstances of being lost (=modern post-traumatic stress syndrome), unlike colonists who believed such people were generally incurable, the Indians claimed that they could be cured by their “At the Edge of the Woods Ceremony,” similar to the Iroquois Condolence ritual. Instead of the bereaved, this ceremony provided comfort to the afflicted person who had been lost by ritually wiping clean the throat, ears, and eyes, countering the travail of the woods, and restoring the person to wholeness. Perhaps a reason for the sparsity of evidence of such trauma in the case of hunters, was that as a rule they hunted in bands rather than as individuals, reducing the chances of getting lost in the woods. Even Daniel Boone, a classic example of the longhunter, most often had hunting companions such as Michael Stoner, Samuel Harrod, William Bush, and Simon Kenton.

The manliness of fearless hunters gained the admiration of neighbors and strangers alike. But they chiefly gained their gratitude and affection by expressions of mutuality.  The usual backcountry custom was that the hunter who drew first blood took the animal.  But in times when hunting was the primary source of subsistence, the hunter divided the spoils, including any settler in need.  However, such mutuality applied only to meat; the hunter alone was entitled to the profits derived from the skins and furs of the animals.  The sharp division between mutuality in matters of others’ genuine need and the profit-driven motives of the hunter, was a practice borrowed from the Indians whose generosity toward travelers was well-known, even though whites (perhaps out of fear and disdain) were not always as generous toward Indians.

The new rules devised by Indian and Euramerican hunters for dividing spoils and measuring manhood seemed to bode well for a growing convergence of frontier cultures.  Their shared “hunting ways” and  provided a common landscape involving elements of private and collective land tenure, including a blend of individual and group rights. In reality, however, it offered no basis for peaceful coexistence. Hunting was one way the trade altered Ohio Indian culture and established European hegemony.  Euramerican traders redefined hunting as an economic function rather than a means of subsistence. This redefinition conflicted with Indians’ naturalistic religious beliefs and cultural values, in which they viewed themselves in a communal relationship with wildlife and limited their hunting to an exclusive meeting of survival needs.  To participate in the trade of European commerce, the Indians were forced to hunt in conflict with their belief-system and kill pelt-bearing animals to near extinction. Similarly, tribal structures were jeopardized as traditional status and social authority were challenged by young hunters due to the change to market-driven economics.  The opposing attitudes of American and Indian hunters toward their prey resulted in a destabilizing of intercultural relations. The environmental foundations of frontier hunting culture exchange  had begun to collapse. Within thirty years after Euramerican hunters, including longhunters, had breached the Trans-Appalachians in the 1760s, the largest game had virtually disappeared from lands on both sides of the Ohio River.  If the longhunters were to continue their annual “treks” into the west, it would be to a far west where game still existed. But so did Indian hunters.  As anti-Indian hatred grew on the frontier, and Indians often withdrew from whites, many  families collected as many furs and skins as they could and took them east of the mountains to barter for necessary items such as salt and iron, and perhaps a better rifle.

The Indians obviously viewed many of the frontier settlers as riffraff, especially when hunters and their longhunter variety not only nearly exterminated the game, but also sought to claim portions of the land for their own possession. This was especially the case of the disregard of the Shawnees’ rights to the lands in Kentucky and elsewhere south of the Ohio, when, based on the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, the Iroquois ceded the region to the British colonials. Objectively viewed, for all the skill and courage displayed by Daniel Boone, his hunting and exploring was

a classic instance of the Euramerican invasion of Amerindians’ rights.  Boone and his fellow “long hunters” on their first expedition to Kentucky in 1769 were perceived by the Shawnees for the menaces that they were to the Indian game and land. Ironically, it was these same Shawnees that had guided fellow Pennsylvania longhunter, John Findlay, Boone’s partner, to the salt licks of Kentucky in 1752. There he saw the thousands of Buffalo and deer that had enticed Boon across the Cumberland Gap.  Ignoring the rights and perils threatened by Shawnees, Boone and his long-hunters slaughtered high numbers of game, and cured and packed the meat at various camps on the Kentucky River. But without warning, a hunting party of Shawnnes, led by chief Captain Will, surprised them, and upon viewing the evidence of wasteful hunting, “sternly demanded” that they see all their camps. Although taken captive, Boone attempted to warn each of the camp guards of  the Shawnees’ coming approach, none were prepared for the confiscation of pelts, hides, packhorses, guns, and ammunition.  Everything not seized was taken and buried.

What happened then neither Boone nor anyone in their hunting party expected from the Indians. The Shawnees let the longhunters go free unhurt, and gave each man two pairs of mocassins, patch leather for necessary repairs to their clothing, a trade rifle, a several loads of powder and shot to provide meat for themselves on their return to the settlements. The Indians’ final words of warning were:

      Now brothers, go home and stay there [i.e. hunt in your own area].  Don’t come here anymore, for this is the Indians’ hunting  all the animals, skins and furs are ours, and if you are so foolish as to venture here again [on a long-hunt], you may be sure the wasps and yellow-jackets will sting you severely.

Those persons intent on glorifying longhunters carte blanc, or Daniel Boone himself, need to appreciate the wastefulness sometimes involved in the slaughtering of game when the meat was thrown away and herds of animals threatened with extinction. Others may need to see from this episode that many Indians did show mercy to white invaders on the long hunt.  Indeed, most of the Indian killings of whites came in retaliation for white massacres or abuses of Indians. But as in the case of Boone and many longhunters their belief in their own cultural superiority as British subjects led them to believe that they had a right to hunt on what they regarded as British, or more specifically in the case of Kentucky, Virginia territory. On that theory, everything the Indians took from them on Boone’s first trip still rightfully belonged to him and his men.

Tempted by what Boone and his longhunters saw on the far backcountry, new parties of longhunters entered Kentucky, including Boone himself.  He returned early in 1770 for a winter hunt and again in 1771, when the Indians once more plundered his longhunters’ goods. Others were led by Casper Mansker, along with Abraham and Isaae Bledsoe, who began on New River in June, 1769.   Although they were robbed by Cherokee hunters, the group resupplied their ammunition and returned to Kentucky to hunt. The Cherokees also plundered a party under Ben Cleveland that had set out from the Yadkin River in North Carolina.  Late in the year 1771 Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs led a sizeable group of longhunters, whose camp was plundered by the Shawnees.  Still the hunting party returned with many peltries.

White longhunters such as those just described lost not only the respect and trust of the Indians, but also some of the whites, especially authorities who were seeking to maintain good relations with the Indians. In 1774  Sir William Johnson, British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Northern Department, provided insight into the nature of the people the problems they were creating when he stated that “ For more than ten years past the most dissolute fellows united with debtors, and persons of a wandering disposition had been traveling from Pennsylvania and Virginia and encroaching upon Indian lands. He described them as idle persons who occupied themselves with little more than hunting, “in which they interfere much more with the Indians than if they pursued agriculture alone, and the Indian hunters...already begin to feel the scarcity this has occasioned, which greatly increases their resentment.”  This statement clearly distinguishes those longhunters earlier described as farmers who went on longhunts once a year and brought back meat for their families and neighbors, in contrast to those who did practically nothing else but hunt, and that in a greedy manner wasteful of considerable animal meat.

                                          The Typical Life of the Frontiersmen

But the frontiersmen had plenty of routine matters to tend to on their lands. For most of them the in-rush of settlers after the Revolution meant the end of their long hunts. Farming and livestock required much of their energy and time.  All too little was left for their wives and children. As the number of frontier families expanded in a given region, creating communities, farmers began to exchange or sell produce and animals. When communities became large enough to support them, frontiersmen (including blacks, free and slave) who were also skilled at certain trades, such as blacksmiths (to make nails or repair guns and cooking utensils) and  woodworkers, provided their services. But there were many who either possessed or acquired such skills as apprentices, and, as with their other enterprises, were very resourceful and self-sufficient. Although the hunters—including the long hunters—still were called upon in cases of occasional Indian raids, they hardly had time (as the longhunter myth would have it) to spend on the hunt or hanging out with Indians. Hunting and adventurous exploring for land was the typical frontiersman’s rapidly vanishing “vacation.”  Women, of course, typically got no vacation!

                                                        “Hoe Agriculture”

This is the term for describing typical farming on the frontier.  Although ploughs were used in the east, they were uncommon west of the Appalachians because they were often too expensive and  too heavy to transport by horseback.. Besides, fields filled with rocks and stumps made it impractical.  Nor was a plough necessary to plant the main subsistence crop of maize corn in mounds with hoes.  Following Indian planting methods, they might plant corn, beans, and squash in one hole in the same mound.  The corn provided the stock on which the beans could climb, while the large leaves of the squash helped to prevent weeds from stifling the growth of the vegetables.  After fields were cleared of stumps and stones, farming frontiersmen could justify the expense of the plough. Planning “long hunts” always revolved around the care of the farm; the only serious exception was going to war. Otherwise, it was not until the end of the fall season when the leaves had largely fallen and the weather turns to rain and snow, that the long hunter departed the family and farm.  If he didn’t return within a year, he was presumed to have been captured or killed by Indians. 

The frontiersman’s primary reason for his presence on the frontier was not to hunt, but to acquire land or to serve as a land agent for others.  In 1750 and 1751 Christopher Gist served as agent to the Ohio Company of Virginia.  In 1775 Daniel Boone explored the lands of Kentucky for Judge Richard Henderson’s planned Transylvania Colony. In the case of securing his own lands, the frontiersman who purchased it, become a tenant farmer with or without a lease, or make a simple-fee occupancy with some improvements (also called a “tomahawk claim”). Such improvements might include building a log cabin, but for many it was the planting of a corn patch. Once he brought his wife (and children, if they had any) to their land, it was his “duty” to take care of them as well as farm, hunt, and go to war. A man or woman who refused to marry and rear children in the18^th century were remiss in their duty, not to say “strange.” Children were regarded as investments, similar to servants or cattle.  The goal of parenting was to rear them to become productive adults to help their parents on the farm,  to care for surviving parents in old age, and to continue farming and protect his own family during Indian wars. Stations and settlers’ forts, built on high ground in a broad field, complete with blockhouses, cabins, a corral for animals, and possibly a well-water source, would offer a safer place of refuge where he would to take his family in the case Indian attacks. Collectively, frontiersmen would stand a better chance of fen- ding off the attack than individually.

                                                    The Frontiersman’s Attire

The clothing and accoutrements of the frontiersman are well described (and often quoted) in the 1784 remarks of John Ferdinand Dalziel Smyth, in his A Tour of the United States of America.  Although these descriptions are late in the century, there is no reason to believe that they were much, if at all, different earlier in the earlier period. A comparison of these items with earlier period documents, such as the journal of Scouwa: James Smith’s Indian Captivity Narrative, confirms this fact. Likewise, the descriptions in Joseph Doddridge’s The Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1763-1783 covers much of the pre- and  post-Revolution period.

 Rather than provide lengthy quotations containing reference to the frontiersman’s clothing and accoutrements, a list of these items will suffice here. The clarifications offered here are largely based on Joseph Ruckman’s Recreating the American Longhunter: 1740-1790 (2000) whose work one might consult for details. Smyth notes that the frontiersman’s “whole dress...[was] not very material different from that of the Indians...”

                                                      Frontier  Men’s Attire

A hunting/rifle shirt —Smyth says it somewhat resembled a waggoner’s frock ornamented with a great many fringes, tied round the middle with a broad belt [sash], much decorated also. But this shirt was not a frock, a pull over, long coarse shirt which reached to below the knee,and was  similar to an English smock.  Rather, the hunting shirt or hunting frock was generally open fronted and more elegant with various fringe ornamentations reaching half way down the thigh. It might be dyed in a variety of colors, but many frontiersmen wore them white. Dodderidge adds that this “universally worn” hunting shirt, had large sleeves and was so wide as to lap over a foot or more when belted.  He also states that the large cape was sometimes fringed with a raveled piece of cloth of a color different from the shirt. And finally he notes that the hunting shirt was generally made of linsey, sometimes of coarse linen, and a few of dressed deerskins.  His reference to a “jacket” is what is now termed a sleeved “waistcoat,” a term that Ruckman says apparently was not used in the 18^th century. Like-wise, until after the Revolutionary War, Indian dress did not include the hunting shirt.

A flapped hat.  No 18^th century frontier documentation for Scots bonnets and coonskin caps.

Indian leather breeches (dressed elk or deer skins), but more frequently thin trousers.

Indian boots or leggings, made of coarse woolen cloth—either wrapped round loosely and tied         with garters, or laced up the outside—and always come more than half way up the thigh.               

Indian moccasins made of strong elk’s or buck’s skin, dressed soft as for gloves or breeches, drawn together in regular plaints over the toe, and lacing from there round to the fore part of the middle of the ankle, without a seam in them, yet fitting close to the feet

Shoepacks were like moccasins, and according to Doddridge, were “made from a single piece of leather, with the exception of a tongue-piece on the top of the foot, which was about two inches broad and circular at the lower end, and to which the main piece of leather was sewed with a gathering stitch. The seam behind was like that of a moccasin, and a sole was some-

times added.”

Shoes might be purchased or as Smyth notes “pumps of their own manufacture.” They probably differed from those made by trained cordwainers by their quality.  Occasionally they were straight-lasted and in exceptional cases were alternated on the expectation that they would wear evenly and preserve their symmetrical appearance. But shoes so constructed were uncomfortable and stretched the seams and caused them to wear out more quickly. More commonly shoes were made on the frontier for function with little concern for symmetry of appearance.

Stockings are seldom mentioned in the period literature on the frontier, but they were used and were similar to modern ones.  Sewn from cloth, the protruding seems were uncomfortable in shoes or moccasins.  To offset the discomfort, woolen leggins might be stuffed into the tops of the footgear. Although stockings were employed for warmth, the common tendency        was to stuff deer hair, leaves, and moss into moccasins to achieve the same affect.

Belts were worn with the hunting shirt consisted of woven sash. It was tied behind to simplify holding fast the overlapping open front of the shirt with the spread out belt, and then tying it in the back.

Breech clout, according to Doddridge, was a piece of linen or cloth nearly a yard long and eight or nine inches wide.  It was strung under the belt on the person’s front and back, leaving the ends for flaps that hang down. To the same belt was attached the strings attached to the breech clouts were attached. In cases where the belt was passed over the hunting shirt, the upper part of the thighs and hips were exposed.  The young frontiersmen, Doddridge noted, showed no embarrassment of his partial nudity, but was proud of his Indian like dress.