When the clash came and the colonists began to strike determinedly for their rights, the English agents in the northwest began operations which once more lighted the fires of border warfare. They bribed the savages with gifts, they supplied them with guns and ammunition and bid them wipe out the little settlements which courage and toil had built up in the wilderness.
Along the borders of the north and the west the terrible war-whoop once more rang out, and the tomahawk and scalping knife resumed their deadly work. But Boonesborough remained calm and unruffled; its settlers hunted and fished, cleared the land and planted scanty crops of corn.
In the winter of 1776 a man was killed by a swift-moving war party; not until the summer, about the very time when the Congress at Philadelphia was giving to the world its first great message of liberty, did the great war cast its first ominous shadow upon Boonesborough.
The July sun shone upon the bright waters of the Kentucky; the breeze stirred among the trees. A bark canoe, propelled by the handsome Betsey Collaway, daughter of a settler, her younger sister Frances, and a young daughter of Daniel Boone, was darting here and there like a bird. The girls had decked the little craft with wild flowers, gathered along the banks, and the ring of their laughter floated across the river in happy chorus.
Any one listening might have noticed that the joyous sound suddenly died away. For the canoe, as it drifted under a high bank, shoved its nose into the mud; and as the girls were about to push it off, they saw the bushes part almost beside them and a number of Indians, their fingers upon their lips calling for silence, step to the water’s edge.
Sheer fright kept the girls mute for an instant; and in the next it was too late to cry out, for the savages had entered the canoe, and were threatening them with their hatchets.
When they saw them huddled, overcome with terror, at one end of the canoe, they seized the paddles and drove the craft out into the river; night was falling and the passage was not noticed from the fort; and so the Indians gained the other shore. The girls were forced out of the boat and with the weapons of their merciless captors ever threatening them they were led away through the forest.
The girls were first missed by the women of their families; a search showed that they were not within the stockade. Instantly the news spread; men dropped their tasks and became alert and active.
Questions flew about; and Sandy Campbell, coming from a runlet where he had been fishing, caught the sense of them.
“Girls!” said he. “Why, I saw them up the river a little way, in a canoe.”