How Kentucky Pioneers Crossed the Western Frontier

The safest means of crossing the western frontier was with groups. Many families who settled in Kentucky traversed the mountains with their families. Yet, the pioneers did not always travel in groups. There were families who set off alone. The heritage of some of these families was interesting. For example, neither Scots nor Germans can claim Daniel Boone; he was in blood a blend of English and Welsh; in character wholly English. His grandfather George Boone was born in 1666 in the hamlet of Stoak, near Exeter in Devonshire. George Boone was a weaver by trade and a Quaker by religion. In England in his time the Quakers were oppressed, and George Boone therefore sought information of William Penn, his coreligionist, regarding the colony which Penn had established in America. In 1712 he sent his three elder children, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out the land. Sarah and Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while their brother returned to England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, George Boone, his wife, and the rest of his children journeyed to Bristol and sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on October 10. The Boones settled in a Quaker community.

Sarah Boone married a German named Jacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township, Berks County. In 1718, George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley where he lived in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren, seventy descendants in all — English, German, Welsh, and…