Daniel Boone: The Pioneer of Kentucky

by John S. C. Abbott

"On the fourteenth of July, 1776, Betsey Calloway, her sister Frances, and Jemima Boone, a daughter of Daniel Boone, the two last about fourteen years of age, carelessly crossed the river opposite Boonesborough in a canoe, at a late hour in the afternoon. The trees and shrubs on the opposite bank were thick, and came down to the water's edge. The girls, unconscious of danger, were playing and splashing the water with their paddles, until the canoe floating with the current, drifted near the shore. Five stout Indians lay there concealed, one of whom, noiseless and stealthy as the serpent, crawled down the bank until he reached the rope that hung from the bow, turned its course up the stream, and in a direction to be hidden from the view of the fort. The loud shrieks of the captured girls were heard, but too late for their rescue.

"The canoe, their only means of crossing, was on the opposite shore, and none dared to risk the chance of swimming the river, under the impression that a large body of savages was concealed in the woods. Boone and Calloway were both absent, and night came on before arrangements could be made for their pursuit. Next morning by daylight we were on the track, and found they had prevented our following them by walking some distance apart through the thickest canes they could find. We observed their course, and on which side they had left their sign and traveled upwards of thirty miles. We then imagined they would be less cautious in traveling, and made a turn in order to cross their trace, and had gone but a few miles when we found their tracks in a buffalo path. We pursued and overtook them on going about ten miles, as they were kindling a fire to cook.

"Our study had been more to get the prisoners without giving the Indians time to murder them, after they discovered us, than to kill them. We discovered each other nearly at the same time. Four of us fired, and all of us rushed on them, which prevented them from carrying away anything, except one shot-gun without ammunition. Mr. Boone and myself had a pretty fair shoot, just as they began to move off. I am well convinced I shot one through, and the one he shot dropped his gun. Mine had none. The place was very thick with canes, and being so much elated on recovering the three broken-hearted girls, prevented our making further search. We sent them off without their mocassins, and not one of them with so much as a knife or a tomahawk."

The Indians seemed to awake increasingly to the consciousness that the empire of the white man in their country could only exist upon the ruins of their own. They divided themselves into several parties, making incessant attacks upon the forts, and prowling around to shoot every white man who could be found within reach of their bullets. They avoided all open warfare, and fought only when they could spring from an ambush, or when protected by a stump, a rock, or a tree. An Indian would conceal himself in the night behind a stump, shoot the first one who emerged from the fort in the morning, and then with a yell disappear in the recesses of the forest. The cattle could scarcely appear for an hour to graze beyond the protection of the fort, without danger of being struck down by the bullet of an unseen foe.

The war of the American Revolution was just commencing. Dreadfully it added to the perils of these distant emigrants. The British Government, with infamy which can never be effaced from her records, called in to her aid the tomahawk and the scalping knife of the savage. The Indian alone in his wild and merciless barbarity, was terrible enough. But when he appeared as the ally of a powerful nation, guided in his operations by the wisdom of her officers, and well provided with guns, powder, and bullets from inexhaustible resources, the settler had indeed reason to tremble. The winter of 1776 and 1777 was gloomy beyond expression. The Indians were hourly becoming more bold. Their predatory bands were wandering in all directions, and almost every day came fraught with tidings of outrage or massacre.

The whole military force of the colony was but about one hundred men. Three hundred of the pioneers, dismayed by the cloud of menace, every hour growing blacker, had returned across the moutains. There were but twenty-two armed men left in the fort at Boonesborough. The dismal winter passed slowly away, and the spring opened replete with nature's bloom and beauty, but darkened by the depravity of man. On the fifteenth of April, a band of a hundred howling Indians appeared in the forest before Boonesborough. With far more than their ordinary audacity, they rushed from their covert upon the fort. Had they been acquainted with the use of scaling ladders, by attacking at different points, they might easily, by their superior numbers, have carried the place by storm.

But fortunately the savages had but little military science, and when once repulsed, would usually retreat in dismay. The garrison, behind their impenetrable logs, took deliberate aim, and every bullet killed or wounded some Indian warrior. The savages fought with great bravery, and succeeded in killing one man in the garrison. Dismayed by the slaughter which they were encountering, they fled, taking their dead and wounded with them. But so fully were they conscious, that would they retain their own supremacy in the wilderness, they must exterminate the white man, that their retreat was only in preparation for a return with accumulated numbers.

An intelligent historian writes:

"Daniel Boone appears before us in these exciting times the central figure towering like a colossus amid that hardy band of pioneers who opposed their breasts to the shock of the struggle which gave a terrible significance and a crimson hue to the history of the old dark and bloody ground."