Submitted by Lynn Greene
Estill County, Ky., Oct 9, 1884
L. C. Draper
Dear Sir:
I will try to answer some of your inquires as best I can.
The mountains in and about the mouth of Red Lick are about 360 ft high with an ascent of about 130 poles from the bottom to the top of the mountain, which you see make it tolerable steep. In many places you will reach the top in 80 or 90 yards- there the mountain is steeper.
In and around my brother Richard's spring you last spoke of, is some two and a half or three miles west of the mouth of Red Lick, and about a miles from the main Station Camp, or perhaps a little more. The mountains there are not so high as at the mouth of Red Lick, and on east up Station Camp Valley.
The upper camp, spoken of in my former letter, was said to have been an old Indian camp.
There are too many caves and rock houses both on Red River, Kentucky River, and Station Camp, to undertake to describe every one of them. I know of none in particular in and around the mouth of Red Lick, or brother Richard's spring- though a man can find rock houses sufficient for camping purposes almost anywhere within a mile of a mountain.
In Estill County, the belt of mountains run northeast and southwest nearly through the center of the county- if any odds, the mountains cover the largest area. The same range of mountains runs on the byway of Big Hill southwest to Iron Mountain; and northeast to the Licking River in Rowen County, a distance of some fifty or sixty miles-or perhaps more, each way.
At the mouth of Sturgeon Creek, some 20 miles up the Kentucky river, east of Irvine, in 1873 or 73, I was making a survey for two litigants of the name of Brandenburg, and at the mouth of the creek, on the lower side, stood a beech tree, with Daniel Boone's name cut on it and the year- the tree was then dead, and old man Brandenburg was very made about its being deadened, and suspicioned Jack B. of having done or at least knew of it.
There is (?) but little cave along the banks of Kentucky River or its tributaries. This mostly cleared up and in cultivation. When I was a boy, 40 or 45 years ago, the region along the river and creeks not cleared was literally cover with cane (?) and certainly more cane than in any portion of the state.
What I first wrote you about the War Fork of Station Camp, I learned from my brother-in-law, Joseph Scrivner, and he is too much on the order of old man Witt to know much about things of that sort.
I will describe a cave or rock house on the dividing ridge between Kentucky River and Station Camp Creek- a Southeast course. It is known as the Old Indian Rock House, of considerable length and width- twenty or thirty yards long, and thirty or forty feet wide in the center, with many signs of ancient habitation-small holes and gutters cut in the rock-bones and ashes in abundance, and many other marks now now recollected. About 150 to 200 yards from the cave stands the famous double white oak tree, that has two bodies at the bottom, standing some six or eight feet apart, and about ten or twelve feet up they join and make one tree or one body some twenty to twenty four inches in diameter. The two lower trunks of it are much the same in size, if I recollect right; and seems to be about the same height of other white oaks of the same size.
On the head waters of Miller's Creek are two more ash caves, with hundreds of bushels of ashes in them, with human bones in the ashes- whole skeletons; and some of them are very large, and some of them certainly very old, as their teeth were worn down nearly to the bone (jaw- it so looks. The two ash caves stand about one mile apart. There are turkey tracks, dog and wolf tracks, and bear tracks, and many curiosities, in and about all three of those three described caves.
I believe brother M. R. Benton, Effingham, Kansas, will better describe Boone's Camp on Station Camp than I can. He is some twenty years my senior (junior?) and never forgets anything he ever knew.
My wife has fully recovered from her illness.
Yours truly,
E. P. Benton
Draper Manuscripts, Boone Papers, p. 49,49(2)49(1), 50
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