Boone: A Biography (33 page)
Read Boone: A Biography Online
Authors: Robert Morgan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #Adventurers & Explorers
In fact, there was a good deal of weeping when it was over. Nathan Reid, one of the rescuers, later said, “
The exultation of the poor girls
cannot be described.” They embraced and thanked their rescuers. The girls were so overcome with gratitude and the men with relief, the fleeing kidnappers were forgotten. “
After the girls came to themselves
enough to speak, they told us there were only five Indians . . . and could all speak good English.” John Floyd also described the place as covered with thick cane, “and being so much elated on recovering the three poor little heart-broken girls, prevented our making any further search.”
The girls showed the effects of the three-day ordeal. Their clothes were torn, their faces dirty and tearstained, eyes swollen from lack of sleep, legs scratched by limbs and briars. Boone wrapped blankets around them and embraced them. “
Thank Almighty Providence
,” Boone said, “for we have the girls safe. Let’s all sit down by them now and take a hearty cry.” Everyone in the party wept with relief and joy. After they had calmed down, Boone remembered that he had shot an Indian and pointed to the place. A rifle was found and drops of blood led into the woods. Two bodies of Shawnees were discovered, one shot by Floyd and one, possibly, by Boone. Two years later Boone would learn that one of the Shawnees killed that day was the son of the man who would become Boone’s captor and adoptive father.
The girls told Boone and the others what they had heard about the Cherokee attacks on Watauga, and the war party on its way to Kentucky. Also the girls knew that a party of Indians was camped only three miles away at the Lower Blue Licks. (
Dragging Canoe and his warriors did
indeed attack the Watauga settlement and were defeated on July 21, 1776. And the Cherokee invasion of Kentucky proved a failure also. After that the more peaceable chiefs among the Cherokees such as Attakullakulla began to regain their influence and authority.)
Taking as much meat from the buffalo as they could carry, the group started back toward Boonesborough. The girls had not had any sleep for two nights and were worn out from the walking and worry. But the exhilaration of being rescued enabled them to make the return journey. Samuel Henderson with his half-shaved face took a lot of teasing. But he was so pleased that Betsy, his fiancée, was safe that he probably didn’t mind the rough humor. Flanders Callaway, who would later marry Jemima, was with the group of riders, and romance added to the cheer and joy of the return. When they came upon the abandoned pony again the girls took turns riding it and did not fall off a single time. By the time they got back to Boonesborough on Wednesday July 17 for a welcome and celebration, Jemima’s foot was healed. Jemima later recalled that when they reached Boonesborough and were ferried across the river, her mother’s joy was intense beyond description. “
She laughed and cried for joy
, as she always did when she was overjoyed,” Jemima said.
The story of the kidnapping of Jemima Boone and the Callaway girls had already spread among the settlements of Kentucky and would soon reach across the mountains to the eastern cities and the world beyond. It became part of the legend of the frontier. Its popularity was spurred in part because Jemima was the daughter of Daniel Boone. But it was also a story that anyone could interpret in whatever way they chose. To Indian haters it was an example of the perfidy and unpredictability of the Indians. After all, Hanging Maw had pretended to be
Boone’s friend. To many, the moral of the story was that Indians were never to be trusted. And the sexual overtones of the five braves grabbing the three beautiful girls from the canoe and forcing them to march in bonds added an edge of horror to the story that did not have to be explained or even commented on. To those with more liberal views of Indians, the story illustrated the code of the warriors. Though they were taking the girls into captivity, they never beat them or molested them sexually. Even though the girls impeded their progress, dropped clues for their pursuers, and made fools of the Indians with the pony, the braves showed extraordinary patience and tolerance. Hanging Maw seemed particularly gentle, even affectionate, with Jemima.
The kidnapping of Jemima and the Callaway girls also signaled the beginning of another cycle of guerilla war on the part of the Shawnees and other Ohio tribes. There would be further attacks. This was just a warning of what was to come. And those predictions seemed to be borne out in raids from the north over the next two years. To an objective observer, with the advantage of hindsight, the kidnapping shows the kind of inflammatory act a few roving Indians could commit, for which the whole nation of the Cherokees or Shawnees would be blamed. Such an act could be committed without the knowledge of the chief or tribe in general. But as far as the settlers were concerned, it was an attack by the Indian nation itself. Chief Cornstalk of the Shawnees blamed such acts by a few young braves for triggering and escalating the deadly troubles of 1777–78. Retaliation for an atrocity on either side might be made against Indians or whites unconnected with the original attack. The logic of blood and passion ruled, and the result was often tragic.
Hanging Maw’s involvement in the kidnapping of the three girls has remained a mystery. He was older than his four companions and he was not known for being warlike. He returned to the Cherokee towns in the southern mountains and was considered a friend of the Americans.
Hanging Maw rose to be
an important chief, urging peace with Americans. He helped negotiate the Tellico Treaty of November
7, 1794. When he died in 1796 he was described by
New York Magazine
on May 1, 1796, as “
a man distinguished for his love of peace
.” It is possible that Hanging Maw’s traveling companions rushed to take the girls on the spur of the moment, inflamed by the angry rhetoric at the conference in Chota, and he felt he had no choice but to go along. After all, they were in territory claimed by some Shawnees, not the Cherokees, and Hanging Maw was outnumbered. Indian custom taught bowing to consensus. The kidnapping may have been so spontaneous an act it was almost an accident. But it has resonated down the halls of American history and fiction and folklore to the present day.
While Boone and his men were rescuing the girls, there had been an attack on Nathaniel Hart’s homestead. His livestock and crops were destroyed, as was the orchard of five hundred apple trees. Outlying settlers gathered at Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan’s Station again, and for the first time in a year work resumed on the fortification of Boonesborough. Picket walls were added between the cabins so there was a stockade, but the blockhouses at the corners were unfinished. George Morgan Chinn tells us, “
Boonesborough had no water supply
within the walls of the fort. When completed, twenty-six log cabins crowded the small enclosure, which measured approximately 260 by 180 feet.”
In his capacity as magistrate of Transylvania,
Boone officiated
at the wedding of Samuel Henderson and Elizabeth Callaway on August 7, 1776. Richard Callaway, who passed up few opportunities to show his resentment of Boone, made Henderson sign a bond stating that he would later have the ceremony repeated by a higher authority when one was available. Even so, it was an occasion of celebration, merriment, and relief. According to George W. Ranck, “
the guests were treated
to home-grown watermelons, of which the whole station was proud.”
Whatever the rumors about her begetting, Jemima was the child closest to Boone of any of his children.
She later told her niece
that while she was with the Indians she vowed that if she was ever rescued
she would never disobey her father again, and she would stay by him. She never forgot looking into the woods and seeing Boone crawling through the brush to her rescue. When Boone was captured by the Shawnees in 1778 and taken to Chillicothe, and the rest of the family assumed he was dead and returned to the Yadkin, it was Jemima who stayed at Boonesborough waiting for his return.
FREEMASONRY
T
HE PEOPLE OF KENTUCKY
were from the first
truly patriotic,” Lyman Draper wrote in his unfinished
The Life of Daniel Boone
. He credited the independent spirit of the largely Scotch-Irish settlers for their support of the American cause. But Draper’s claim is a gross simplification. While there was a dislike of authority and a spirit of independence among many of those who had gone to Kentucky, it was a spirit more personal than political. Many had come to Kentucky hoping to leave such issues as loyalty behind. It wasn’t clear whether Kentucky was a new colony, a county in one of the older colonies, or what.
While Daniel Boone was mostly concerned with events in the wilderness far over the mountains, the war that broke out between the British government and the colonies in the East in 1775 affected much of what eventually took place in the settlement of the Middle Ground.
It is well known that many of the leaders of the American Revolution were Freemasons. Because their meetings were secret, it was easy for Freemasons to covertly organize as patriots. Franklin’s high-degree membership gave him a special advantage in his negotiations for the American cause in Paris, as many of the political and intellectual leaders whose support he needed, including Voltaire and Helvetius, were Masons.
Freemasonry’s ideals of fraternity, equality, freedom, reason, and high moral purpose inspired many to think about society and politics in a new way. The international nature of Freemasonry affected the American cause directly, as military leaders such as Lafayette from France and Baron von Steuben from Germany offered their services to American brothers of the apron. There were also Free masons in the British army, and it is thought that redcoat Masons were sometimes reluctant to kill their brother Masons on the rebelling side.
The first lodge in Kentucky
was not established until 1788, but many Masons, including Boone, were there in 1775.
Though not a Freemason, no one was more influential in stirring America toward rebellion than Patrick Henry of Hanover County, Virginia. Born in 1736, two years after Boone, Henry tried a number of occupations before training himself for the law. He was a spellbinding public speaker. Known as a radical, he vigorously attacked the Stamp Act. As a delegate to the House of Burgesses between 1765 and 1774, and to the Continental Congress between 1774 and 1776, he made fiery speeches that were printed and quoted everywhere: “If this be treason, make the
most of it” and “Give me liberty or give me death” are, of course, his best-known phrases. Elected governor of the new state of Virginia in 1776, he secretly appointed George Rogers Clark to attack British forts in the Illinois country. For the future Republic this may have been his most significant act.
George Washington, who kept the Continental Army from disintegrating in the darkest days of the Revolution, was an active Mason. Boone had met Washington in 1755 when he served with the militia and again in 1760 in Culpeper, Virginia, and it is likely that Washington inspired Boone to become a Freemason.
But the spirit of rebellion was demonstrated more explicitly in Harrodsburg than in Boonesborough. In June of 1776
the Harrodsburg community
elected the Committee of Safety, whose members wrote to the new Virginia government that they were willing to aid in any way they could “
the present laudable cause
of American freedom.” The authors of the letter hoped that Virginia’s new government would recognize their claims in Kentucky and validate their deeds. George Rogers Clark and John Gabriel Jones were elected to represent the settlers.
It was in the fall of 1777 that the British decided to expand the role of their Indian allies in the west to attack the American settlements. With Indians doing most of the fighting and dying, it would cost the British relatively little to enlarge the western front in the assault on the rebelling colonies.
Lt. Gov. Henry Hamilton at Detroit (who belonged to a family that included many prominent Freemasons) was directed to use Native Americans “
in making a Diversion and exciting
an alarm upon the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania.” Hamilton offered generous bounties for scalps of settlers in the Ohio Valley. Because this policy increased the ferocity and frequency of Indian raids into Kentucky and outraged the settlers, Hamilton may have done the British more harm than good. As a result, Hamilton’s offers of pardons and free land to any who crossed to the British side were later largely ignored.
Battle of the Blue Licks
. George Gray. Oil on canvas on plywood. 1938. The battle on August 19, 1782, has been described as “the last battle of the American Revolution.” (Courtesy Kentucky Historical Society.)
Light and Shadow
1777–1778
Describing Kentucky at this time, the historian Reuben Gold Thwaites wrote, “
Hill and valley, timberland and thicket
, meadow and prairie, grasslands and canebrake—these abounded on every hand, in happy distribution of light and shadow.” The extraordinary beauty was matched by the extreme danger. A party of Cherokees was defeated at Island Flats on July 20, 1776, and later the settlers in Kentucky heard that the Cherokees, encouraged by the British, had attacked Watauga on the next day. As the Indian raids continued in Kentucky, more settlers returned to the East. John Floyd remarked that he had only thirty men left to defend Boonesborough. With supplies running low, and the threat of Indian attacks increasing, more and more unmarried men returned east. Floyd wrote to Preston, “
I want as much to return
as any person can do, but if I leave the country now, there is scarcely one single man hereabouts, but what will follow the example. When I think of the deplorable condition a few helpless families are likely to be in, I conclude to sell my life as dear as I can, in their defense rather than make an ignominious escape.” The fort was low on ammunition again, and in September Col. Arthur Campbell of the Holston Valley sent a small shipment of powder and lead, which was divided among the men of the community. The supply Boone had brought from Williamsburg in June was long gone. Lead was so scarce that John Harrod
and Benjamin Logan took packhorses to Long Island of the Holston to secure a supply, which they distributed among the Kentucky settlements when they returned in October.