Hello everyone. This is Woody in the Woody Shop.

Being Friday and all, I thought I’d tell you another story.

So far in our Frontier Stories we’ve had explorers, survivors, peacemakers and one fellow who spent a good portion of his story running for his life.

This week, we’ve got a man who looked at a mountain range and apparently thought:

We ought to put a road through there.

His name was Daniel Boone.

And contrary to what you might have gathered from television, Daniel Boone did not discover Kentucky.

People had been traveling through that country for a very long time.

Native peoples knew the trails.

Hunters knew the game paths.

Explorers knew there was a natural break through the Appalachian Mountains called the Cumberland Gap.

There was a way through.

There just wasn’t a road.

Boone knew the country himself.

He had first passed through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky years earlier and spent a good deal of time hunting and exploring there.

Which came in handy in 1775, when a land speculator named Richard Henderson and his Transylvania Company decided they needed somebody to help open a route into Kentucky.

They hired Daniel Boone.

The assignment was simple enough to say.

Make a way west.

So Boone gathered a crew of axmen and headed into the wilderness.

There were no bulldozers.

No road graders.

No chainsaws.

And, unless somebody has uncovered one since we started writing this, no Bobcats.

Just axes, muscle and whatever steel they could carry.

They followed existing trails and traces through the Cumberland Gap, cutting brush, clearing timber and widening the path as they went.

Tree in the way?

Cut it.

Brush too thick?

Clear it.

Trail too narrow?

Make it wider.

Mountain?

Well...

Find the opening.

And keep going.

The route they cut and improved stretched roughly 200 miles toward the Kentucky River.

At the end of it, Boone and his party established Boonesborough, one of Kentucky’s earliest settlements.

And behind them came people.

At first, many traveled on foot or horseback with pack animals.

As the route was improved, wagons followed.

Then more families.

More livestock.

More wagons.

Lots of wagons.

What Boone and his men helped create became known as the Wilderness Road.

And over the years that followed, tens of thousands of settlers would travel that route into Kentucky and farther west.

Daniel Boone didn’t discover the Cumberland Gap.

He didn’t discover Kentucky.

He helped open the way.

Which brings us to the knife.

Because if your assignment is to head into the woods with a bunch of axmen and turn a trail into a road...

we figure you ought to bring something sharp.

For Boone, we wanted something substantial.

Something useful.

And something that looked like it might have already been somewhere.

So we built an 11-3/4-inch frontier knife with a broad working blade forged in Raindrop Damascus.

For the handle, we used warm antique white oak scales — the kind of wood that just looks right next to Damascus and brass.

Then, because this is part of our America 250 celebration, we slipped in a little red, white and blue.

Old Glory liners.

Brass pins and lanyard tube.

And our red, white and blue patriotic mosaic pin.

A little patriotism without waving it around too much.

And, of course, it rides in a hand-stitched top-grain leather sheath made by Lonnie Hyatt.

We don’t know exactly what kind of knife Daniel Boone carried while he and his men were cutting the Wilderness Road in 1775.

But we know they needed edges.

Axes for the timber.
Knives for darn near everything else.

So we called this one:

THE OPENING

Sometimes you find a way. Sometimes you make one.

And if Old Woody had been standing there when Boone said it was time to make a way west?

We reckon we’d have handed him this one.

Next Friday, we’ve got one more Frontier Story — and one more knife made to remember it by.

After that?

Well, looks like we’re done.

Until then, keep your blade sharp, your wagon pointed west —

and if there isn’t a way, make one.

— Frank