CHAPTER VI.
Sufferings of the Pioneers.
Emigration to Boonesborough.—New Perils.—Transylvania Company.—Beneficence of its Laws.—Interesting Incident.—Infamous conduct of Great Britain.—Attack on the Fort.—Reinforcements.—Simon Kenton and his Sufferings.—Mrs. Harvey.
The fortress at Boonesborough consisted of ten strong log huts arranged in a quadrangular form, enclosing an area of about one-third of an acre. The intervals, as before stated, between the huts, were filled with strong palisades of timber, which, like the huts themselves, were bullet-proof. The outer sides of the cabins, together with the palisades, formed the sides of the fort exposed to the foe. Each of these cabins was about twenty feet in length and twelve or fifteen in breadth. There were two entrance gates opposite each other, made of thick slabs of timber, and hung on wooden hinges. The forest, which was quite dense, had been cut away to such a distance as to expose an assailing party to the bullets of the garrison. As at that time the Indians were armed mainly with bows and arrows, a few men fully supplied with ammunition within the fort could bid defiance to almost any number of savages. And subsequently, as the Indians obtained fire-arms, they could not hope to capture the fort without a long siege, or by assailing it with a vastly overwhelming superiority of numbers. The accompanying illustration will give the reader a very correct idea of this renowned fortress of logs, which was regarded as the Gibraltar of Indian warfare.
Having finished this fort Daniel Boone, leaving a sufficient garrison for its security, set out for his home on the Clinch river to bring his wife and family to the beautiful land he so long had coveted for their residence. It seems that his wife and daughters were eager to follow their father to the banks of the Kentucky, whose charms he had so glowingly described to them. Several other families were also induced to join the party of emigration. They could dwell together in a very social community and in perfect safety in the spacious cabins within the fortress. The river would furnish them with an unfailing supply of water. The hunters, with their rifles, could supply them with game, and with those rifles could protect themselves while laboring in the fields, which with the axe they had laid open to the sun around the fort. The hunters and the farmers at night returning within the enclosure, felt perfectly safe from all assaults.
Daniel Boone commenced his journey with his wife and children, and others who joined them, back to Boonesborough in high spirits. It was a long journey of several hundred miles, and to many persons it would seem a journey fraught with great peril, for they were in danger almost every mile of the way, of encountering hostile Indians. But Boone, accustomed to traversing the wilderness, and accompanied by well armed men, felt no more apprehensions of danger than the father of a family would at the present day in traveling by cars from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania.
It was beautiful autumnal weather when the party of pioneers commenced its adventurous tour through the wilderness, to find a new home five hundred miles beyond even the remotest frontiers of civilization. There were three families besides that of Boone, and numbered in all twenty-six men, four women, and four or five boys and girls of various ages. Daniel Boone was the happy leader of this heroic little band.
In due time they all arrived safely at Boonesborough "without having encountered," as Boone writes, "any other difficulties than such as are common to this passage." As they approached the fort, Boone and his family, for some unexplained reason, pressed forward, and entered the fortress a few days in advance of the rest of the party. Perhaps Boone himself had a little pride to have it said, that Mrs. Boone and her daughter were the first of her color and sex that ever stood upon the banks of the wild and beautiful Kentucky.