Boone: A Biography (23 page)

The slave named Adam watched in horror as both James and Henry begged to be killed and not tortured further. James cried out for his mother and then screamed that he was afraid his family farther up the trail had been attacked also. The other Indians were in a hurry to get going with their plunder. Only a small number participated in the torture. Finally, the boys’ skulls were beaten in with tomahawks and their bodies shot full of arrows. The arrows were not just a ritual but also a warning, a calling card, to show who had killed them and a sign of the fate of any who trespassed on Indian territory. When the Indians left they took the slave Charles with them.

Ironically the bodies were discovered that morning by a young man from Boone’s party who had stolen a pack of deerskins and was riding back to the settlements. Seeing the bloody and mangled bodies, he galloped back to the camp and warned those just awaking. Fearing an imminent attack, Boone organized the men for defense, building a rude fort of brush and felled logs, and sent Squire back with a party to bury the dead. Rebecca gave Squire two linen sheets to wrap around the mutilated bodies. Before Squire and his party got to the scene, Russell and his group had already arrived there. They wrapped the Mendinalls in one sheet and James and Henry in the other and buried them in one grave, under logs, to keep the wolves from reaching them.

Adam, who had witnessed the torture scene and murders, wandered stunned in the woods for eleven days before he showed up to tell his gruesome tale. Crabtree, who had been wounded only slightly, appeared in Castle Wood about a week later.
The slave Charles was found with his head
split in two about forty miles farther on. Bones,
thought to be those of the hired man, Drake, were found nearby twenty years later.

It took days to round up the scattered cattle while the people tried to recover from the attack. The men called a council and it was decided they were too small a party to proceed to the Cumberland Gap with the Indian threat so great. Discouraged, they returned to the Clinch River, and many went back to their homes on the Yadkin. But Boone and his family stayed on the Clinch River in a cabin lent to them by David Gass. They would remain in the area for almost two years, until Boone could organize a larger effort to settle in Kentucky.

Lord Dunmore demanded that those who had perpetrated the torture and murders be punished. The colonial Indian agent sent his deputy, Alexander Cameron, to the Cherokees at the town of Cho-tee to deliver the order. After much argument and opposition from the young braves, it was decided that a chief named No-ta-wa-gun was the guilty one and should be put to death. No-ta-wa-gun was first wounded by his appointed executioners but left alive. His relatives tried to protect him from further harm. But Alexander Cameron demanded that the sentence be carried out, and after much haranguing, No-ta-wa-gun was finally killed.

One other Cherokee who had taken part in the massacre escaped to live with the Chickasaws but was later caught and also executed. Big Jim returned north to the Shawnee towns. The chiefs warned the young Indians that this would be the fate of any who engaged in such acts of cruelty. Lord Dunmore expressed his satisfaction with the Cherokee conduct, “
a remarkable instance of their good faith
and strict regard to justice.” The Shawnees were named by Dunmore as the main instigators of the episode. But the Shawnee Big Jim would go unpunished until he met his death in another clash with the whites thirteen years later in Ohio.

Anger against the white invaders seemed to spread among the young warriors of all the tribes, Cherokee, Mingo, Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandotte. A companion of young Simon Kenton was killed at their camp
near the Kanawha. A party of hunters in Kentucky led by Gilbert and Robert Christian was attacked by a band of Cherokees led by Tom Benge. At first pretending friendship, the Indians fired on their hosts in the camp and killed four hunters.
The Christian brothers escaped
. Angered by the attack on Wallen’s Creek, where he had been wounded, Isaac Crabtree killed three Cherokees at a social gathering at Watauga and then escaped to Kentucky, aggravating the already tense conditions on the frontier. The murder of the Boone and Russell boys seemed to set off a chain reaction of killings on both sides.

Someone who saw Boone on the Clinch River at this time described him as wearing “
deer-skin coloured black
and had his hair plaited and clubbed up, and was on his way to or from Powell’s Valley.” Apparently Boone wore his hair long but plaited all his life. Clubbed meant the braid was tied in a kind of knot behind his head. While he lived in David Gass’s cabin on the Clinch, Boone spent much time hunting in the nearby mountains. In the spring of 1774 Boone went alone to hunt in Powell’s Valley, and to visit the grave of his son James and Henry Russell. He pushed aside the logs over the grave when he arrived. Scratching in the ground with a stick, he decided to see if the bodies had been disturbed. Wolves had not reached the bodies, and the features of the boys were still distinguishable, blood still visible on their cut and burned heads. James Boone’s hair was blond while Russell’s was very dark. Boone dug the grave a little deeper and replaced the log covering. According to Lyman Draper, “
There suddenly arose a severe
storm, which lasted some considerable time. During its continuance, from the melancholy associations and gloominess of the place, mingled with the dismal howlings of the storm, Boone felt more dejected, as he used afterwards to relate, than he ever did in all his life.”

Later, as he made camp and tried to sleep, he heard Indians prowling about. Nathan told Draper the sadness of the place made Boone feel worse than he ever had before.
Whenever the death of James was mentioned
he was visibly moved. In the dark he packed up and left, leaving the bell on his horse sounding so the Indians would think it
was just grazing until he got some distance away. Then he rode quickly to put distance between himself and the scene.

I
F
B
OONE
had planned to attempt another settlement in Kentucky in 1774, he was frustrated by growing hostilities. The rising violence between Indians and whites on the frontier culminated in a series of events that came to be called Lord Dunmore’s War. Fear and anger on both sides rose to a new pitch. Hunters in Kentucky shot Indians on sight, and Indians attacked whites without warning. As more and more surveyors poured into the Great Meadow, even the peaceable chiefs could not persuade the young warriors that the tide of settlement was not going to sweep over their hunting lands in Kentucky and reach their villages and tribal claims in Ohio. The colonies did not doubt that war was imminent. On January 25, 1774, a party of militia fired into a Shawnee encampment near Fort Pitt. In March, Lord Dunmore urged the colonies to prepare for war. A contemporary remembered, “
Whoever saw an Indian in Kentucky
saw an enemy—no questions were asked on either side—but from the muzzles of their rifles.” Accounts of Henry Russell’s murder were reiterated as evidence of the threat. Few of the published articles on the massacre mentioned James Boone by name. The Boones were not as important as the Russells. That winter and spring, parties along the Ohio River were fired on and robbed by Shawnees.
One group of Shawnees claimed
Colonel Croghan, commander at Fort Pitt, had told them to kill all Virginians invading their territory and merely rob those from Pennsylvania. This is an indication of extreme rivalry between the different colonies for control of the Ohio Valley.

Captain Russell, under orders from Col. William Preston, sent a party of men over the mountains to the head of Powell’s River on April 15 to be on the lookout for hostile Indians coming from the north. He ordered his men to act friendly until they found out the Indians’ intentions, then hurry back to warn the settlers of any invading war party. Scattered fighting between Indians and whites became more frequent
all up and down the frontier. Governor Dunmore sent out a warning to all the settlements that a state of war already existed between the Indian nations and the colonies. Chiefs like Cornstalk of the Shawnees, who had been urging peace, felt betrayed by this proclamation. In retrospect it appears Dunmore may well have made things worse by exaggerating the danger. A classic way of increasing and maintaining one’s power is to make people afraid. And the governor’s greed for western lands may well have influenced his actions. Dunmore’s alarms almost certainly heightened the tensions.
It would seem that Dunmore wanted a war
to further his own speculative plans for land claims in the west.

In this atmosphere of fear and apprehension, both Governor Dunmore and Colonel Preston told William Russell, in his capacity as a colonial official, that the surveyors sent into Kentucky must be warned of the danger, and that he should “
employ two faithful woodsmen
to repair to Kentucky to notify the surveyors of their dangers.” Boone and Michael Stoner agreed to dash into Kentucky to let the surveying parties, which included Hancock Taylor, James Douglas, Isaac Hite, and John Floyd, know of the threat. Michael Stoner’s only hesitation was that he didn’t have a rifle. “
Well, Mike, you’ll have mine
and I’ll have another,” Boone is reported to have said. “You’re the man for me.”

According to a deposition Boone made October 6, 1817, in St. Charles County, Missouri, he and Stoner crossed the Cumberland Mountain chain through Pound Gap, called then the Sounding Gap. Col. Andrew Lewis gave them directions. “
[Lewis] directed me to cross
the Cumberland mountains at what we now call the sounding Gap, at an old war-road that would convey me immediately on the waters of Big or perhaps Little Sandy.” Boone added that when he received the orders from Governor Dunmore, he was told “to take the Kentucky and Meander to its Mouth” as soon as he got over the Cumberland Mountains.

The Sounding Gap is just a few miles from the headwaters of the Cumberland, Kentucky, and Big Sandy rivers. It is reported that
Boone rented a horse for sixty-two days for this journey. Apparently on horseback, Boone and Stoner crossed the mountains on an old hunter’s trace, struck the Kentucky River near its source, and followed it downstream. It would be hard to imagine a more dangerous journey than the two hunters had agreed to undertake. With Indians prowling the wilderness and attacking at random, and the exact location of the surveying parties unknown, the two woodsmen had to find about two dozen men in twenty million to thirty million acres of woodland. All Boone knew was that some of the surveyors were in the Bluegrass region near the Kentucky River or maybe near the Falls of the Ohio. But in fact they could have been almost anywhere, and they could already have been killed. One of the ironies of this mission to warn the surveyors is that Floyd and his crews were claiming the best land in all of Kentucky for the officers and veterans back in Virginia. The colonial surveyors were preempting the very land that Boone and others like him yearned for. In that sense he and Stoner undertook the dangerous expedition to warn their greatest rivals for the most desirable real estate in Kentucky.

Dangerous as the mission was, and as important as its object, the foray sounds like something of a frolic too. Boone and Stoner became great friends, and Boone enjoyed telling a story of Stoner being charged by a buffalo at a salt lick while Boone collapsed with laughter.
Boone liked to imitate
Stoner’s thick German accent when he told the story. However much laughter they may have shared on the trip, they still knew they were in great danger, and slept in thickets and canebrakes, putting their campfires out as soon as meals were cooked. And while they ate they sat back to back, on the lookout for Indians.

According to another deposition, taken April 24, 1794, at Point Pleasant, Virginia, Boone had agreed, before Lord Dunmore asked him to warn the surveyors, to survey and mark a claim in Kentucky for James Hickman. With danger gathering on all sides, Boone and his backers were still thinking of land claims and the future. “
On the last of May or first [of] June 1774
, Mr. James Hickman employed me
to locate, enter and direct the survey of 4000 acres of land as soon as the time would admit of, and on the 26th of June the same year I was employed by Governor Dunmore to go out to that country and give the surveyors notice of the breaking out of the Indian War and I took with me Michael Stoner.”

The fact that Boone and Stoner duly located and marked the four thousand acres for Hickman on what was later called Hickman Creek near future Boonesborough (on land that turned out to have already been surveyed by James Douglas) does not lessen the oddness of this hurried, dangerous trip. Considering the area they had to cross, and with the surveying parties so scattered, there has been little agreement about which surveyors Boone and Stoner actually encountered. Boone and Stoner were probably not even sure how many surveyors they were supposed to warn. Besides their rifles and supplies, they must have carried a compass, and a Gunter’s chain sixty-six feet long for the surveying. Luckily Boone already knew much of Kentucky by heart. They probably carried their compass concealed except when it was actually in use. Day after day the two traveled down the Kentucky River, keeping alert for sign of Indians as well as surveyors. They made small campfires, or none, and slept in a cave when they could find one, canebrakes when they couldn’t, away from buffalo traces or warrior’s trails. They fired their rifles only when necessary to procure game. They stopped and listened often for the sound of voices, for the chop of a marker’s axe, for the telltale bark or birdcall an Indian might make.

For much of its length the Kentucky River runs in a gorge cut through limestone. Cliffs loom high over its waters. When Boone and Stoner stepped out on the bluffs to scout the valley ahead, they did not stay there long to be spotted by those paddling on the river or hiding in thickets where a meadow opened out beside the stream. Scanning the river ahead, they quickly ducked back into cover and made their way a few more miles down the valley.