The civilized necessity for salt was one of the chief causes of danger for these Kentuckians. In 1778 Boone, with twenty-seven companions, was engaged in salt-making at the Blue Licks, when they were surrounded by a large band of Indians. Boone was made captive, with others, and taken north across the Ohio River. These savages were Shawanese, from the Pickaway Plain. Eventually they took Boone as far north as Detroit, where the commandant, Hamilton, pleased with Boone’s manly character, undertook to ransom him from the savages. The latter, however, would not hear to this, and after some parleying concluded to make Boone one of their tribe.
He lived with them for some months, his fate meantime quite unknown to his friends at Boonesborough. At length, discovering a war party of more than four hundred savages preparing to invade the Kentucky frontier, he escaped from his captors, journeyed two hundred miles to the southward, and saved not only Boonesborough but all the infant posts of this new commonwealth beyond the Alleghanies. This, were there naught else to commend him, should establish Boone’s place as one of the great pillars of the west-bound civilization.
After the savages were at last beaten away in this attack, Boone found that he was a man not without a country, but without a family. His wife, supposing him dead, had returned to the old home on the Yadkin. There is a wide hiatus here in the Boone history, regarding which Boone himself is reticent.
It is probable that at this time there began those legal difficulties that later caused the pioneer to leave his chosen land. He had been given a grant of land by the governor of Virginia, but the state of Kentucky had never been surveyed, and it was the fashion and privilege of every holder of one of these loose titles to locate his land as he pleased, and to record it in the simplest and most primitive fashion. Thus there came to be many claimants for the best of the lands, the desirable tracts being sometimes deeply covered by these old-time “shingle titles.”
The courts swiftly followed into these crude little Kentucky communities. It may have been the legal complications in which Boone now found himself that made him unwilling to speak of this period of his career. It is also known that at one time he was custodian of some twenty thousand dollars of money, which he intended to take eastward across the Alleghanies for the purchase of lands. He was robbed, and hence carried to his grave the bitter sense that he had, through no fault of his own, been unable to carry out a trust that had been imposed on him. Yet, be these things as they may, the fact remains that he did again bring his family to his chosen settlement on the Kentucky River.
Meantime the Northern savages, under their own leaders, under the leadership of British officers, under the leadership of the dangerous renegades, Girty and McKee, came down time and again on the Kentucky settlements. The salt parties must go out as before, and in one of these excursions Squire Boone, Daniel’s beloved older brother, fell a victim to the savages. In the celebrated and ill-fated McGary fight—the blackest battle of all Kentucky—a son of Daniel Boone’s fell with the flower of the frontier. Again and again the tribes came raging down, the Cherokees, the Pottawatamies, the Shawanese, all joining hands to wipe these settlements from the face of the earth. In the fight at Bryant’s Station, little as it was, thirty of the savages were left on the field.
The year 1781 was one of wrath for the thin firing line on the western side of the Divide. All the fights and the fighters centered about or came from the “Dark and Bloody Ground.” Clark, Hardin, Harmar—all these started from Kentucky, and by reason of Kentucky. It was General Scott with one thousand Kentuckians that avenged the horrible defeat of St. Clair, killed two hundred of the victorious savages, and took back from them their booty. In the seven years from 1783 to 1790 there were fifteen hundred whites killed or taken captive in the state of Kentucky. In all these affairs, we may be sure, Daniel Boone held his full and manly part. He had drunk the war-drink of the savages during his captivity, and the spirit of the savage had entered into him.
Yet Boone was simple and unpretentious as any leader that ever lived. Once Simon Kenton, himself a hardy soul, set out with some friends on a little hunt from the station at Boonesborough. They were fired upon by Indians from ambush. One man was shot down by the Indians within seventy yards of the stockade. His murderer would have scalped him had not Kenton dropped him, a corpse beside a corpse. Then it was general mêlée until Daniel Boone and ten others came out from the stockade to assist their fighting comrades. Kenton killed another Indian, and then there came a rush. Boone directed a charge upon the savages, but was shot down, a ball breaking his leg. Kenton, brave fellow that he was, shot down Boone’s assailant and carried Boone safely into the fort. As he lay on the couch receiving attention for the leg broken by the ball, Boone sent for Kenton and said: “Well, Simon, you have behaved like a man to-day. Indeed you are a fine fellow.” That was all there was to it. They made no great parade in those days. There was no proclamation in the public places. There were no illustrated newspapers, no gifted war correspondents to describe the heroism of that time. A similar act to-day would have made both participants famous, would perhaps have won for both a Victoria Cross, and would have afforded imaginative correspondents excellent opportunity. The West had no Victoria Crosses, nor needed any.
In times of such continual excitement and danger it is small wonder that there has been but scant record kept of individual deeds of daring. Boone himself was not wont to boast of his own prowess, and regarding his deeds of arms there are not many authentic anecdotes.
One of the best known of his adventures was that in which he met two savages in the forest while he himself was alone. Those were flint-lock days, and Boone was, according to the story, able, by watching the flash of the first savage’s rifle, to throw himself out of the way of the bullet. This manœuver he repeated with the second Indian. Then he calmly shot one Indian dead with his rifle, closed with the other, received a blow of his tomahawk on his own rifle barrel, and killed the savage with his knife. A statue commemorating this feat was later placed above the south door of the rotunda in the Capitol at Washington.