Boone: A Biography (34 page)

The Kentucky communities were vulnerable at this time because only Harrodsburg had a stockade completed, or nearly completed, and none had found a supply of lead in the region or had the means of making gunpowder. And they were more than two hundred miles from the protection of the Virginia militia. In the event of a British-instigated attack by Indians, they were on their own. Too busy clearing land, raising corn, building cabins, and hunting for meat to prepare for war, most of the settlers felt helpless as the Revolutionary conflict spread over the mountains and down the Ohio Valley. It was like a continuation of Lord Dunmore’s War, except now the Crown was urging the Indians to attack, rather than opposing them. “
Their attempts to defend themselves
constituted, in their eyes, an important military service to Virginia . . . and, as such, the settlers felt entitled to succor and supplies,” Nancy O’Malley has observed.

On December 29, 1776, a Mingo chief named Captain Pluggy and his war party attacked McClelland’s Station. George Rogers Clark had just arrived at McClelland’s, on his way to retrieve the hidden powder the state of Virginia had given him. Captain Pluggy was killed and the Indians beaten back. Two whites, including McClelland himself, were killed. This fight with Captain Pluggy and the Mingoes was the beginning of what became known as the terrible Year of the Three Sevens, 1777, sometimes called the Terrible Sevens. It began with the death of Captain Pluggy and the esteemed McClelland, and it would not end until many more lives were lost and much blood spilled on the “dark and bloody ground.” So many settlers would leave Kentucky that only Harrodsburg and Boonesborough remained occupied.

Hugh McGary, who had been elected chairman of the Kentucky Committee of Safety, sent a letter to the governor of Virginia dated February 27, 1777. “
We are surrounded with enemies
on every side; every day increases their numbers,” the emotional McGary wrote. “Our
fort is already filled with widows and orphans; their necessities call upon us daily for supplies.”

Luckily there was a lull in the attacks and Benjamin Logan and his family left Harrodsburg to reoccupy Logan’s Station. A message arrived from Virginia confirming Clark’s commission as a major in the new state militia. Daniel Boone, James Harrod, John Todd, and Benjamin Logan were commissioned as captains. Whatever the status of the Transylvania Company, Virginia intended to recognize the Transylvania settlers as citizens of the new county and make use of their services. The militia assembled, expecting an attack.

It came March 5 when Cottawamago, or Chief Blackfish, and about seventy Shawnees attacked a party of maple syrup boilers near Harrodsburg. They killed William Ray and took as prisoner Thomas Shores. James Ray, hardly more than a boy, outran the Indians, a feat Blackfish never forgot. William Coomes hid in a tree that had fallen into a sinkhole and watched the Shawnees celebrate their victory by mutilating William Ray’s body, dancing, and drinking maple syrup. Later that day James Harrod and Hugh McGary organized a party of thirty men and rode out in search of the syrup makers.
When they found Ray’s mangled body
they thought it was the other William, Coomes, but Coomes came out of hiding and they buried Ray’s body.

The attack on Harrodsburg inspired the men to continue work on the fortification of Boonesborough. Boone was able to get enough cooperation to complete most of the palisade. The blockhouses at the corners were not finished, but at least there was an enclosure, with pickets between cabins and gates that could be shut in case of attack.

Blackfish’s Shawnees were still roving about. The Shawnees had every reason to attack the Kentucky settlers, who were claiming and destroying their buffalo hunting grounds. But many Shawnees were now also loyal to the British, who had once saved them from the anger of the Six Nations. Making war on the forts was a way of showing their enduring gratitude. A party appeared at Boonesborough on March 7, killed a black man working in the fields, and wounded another man.
There were more attacks on Harrodsburg and scattered settlements later in March.

On the morning of April 24, 1777, Daniel Goodman and another man left the stockade at Boonesborough to drive in some horses gathered a quarter of a mile away. They were fired on by a small party of Indians and tried to run back to the fort, but Goodman was overtaken and tomahawked and scalped. Young Simon Kenton, about to start out on a hunt, saw what was happening and shot the Indian who had taken Goodman’s scalp. Then Kenton and the others chased the rest of the Indians away. Boone and about a dozen men, hearing the shots, rushed out of the stockade with their rifles. They followed Kenton out into the fields, not realizing that the small party of Indians was a decoy. More than a hundred Indians were hiding behind stumps and brush. While Boone and his men were advancing, Kenton saw an Indian about to fire on them. Kenton shot the ambusher, and while he was reloading and Boone and the others scanned the thickets, a large number of Indians rushed out to cut off their retreat to the fort.

“
Boys, we are gone—let us sell
our lives as dearly as we can,” Boone shouted, and gave orders to charge right through the Indians. The men fired into the Shawnees and then swung their rifles as clubs. The Boonesborough men fought with fury, but Boone himself was shot in the ankle and the bone was broken. As Boone fell, an Indian rushed to tomahawk him but was shot by Kenton, who then used his rifle to club another warrior attempting to scalp Boone. The powerful Kenton picked up Boone and carried him to the fort, where Rebecca and her daughters were watching. Jemima rushed out to help carry her father inside. Three other men, John Todd, Isaac Hite, and Michael Stoner, were wounded in the melee but were helped by William Bush back to the fort. The Shawnees later admitted they lost twenty-two braves in this battle.

Back in the fort, as the wounded were being nursed, Boone said to Kenton, “
Well, Simon, you have behaved like a man
to-day; indeed
you are a fine fellow.” There is no better example of frontier understatement. Boone and Kenton had immense respect for each other and knew they had to depend on each other. But when they spoke from the heart they used few words.

Five days later, at Harrodsburg, Francis McConnell and James Ray were practicing their marksmanship outside the fort when an Indian appeared and shot McConnell. Thinking the Indian was alone, Ray rushed at him, but just then a large number of Indians appeared and shot at Ray. Luckily he was not hit and ran the 150 yards to the fort but found the gate closed. He dropped behind a stump a few feet from the stockade wall and was pinned down there for hours while bullets kicked up dirt around him. His mother watched through a loophole in the fort. Finally Ray shouted, “
For God’s sake, dig a hole under
the cabin wall and take me in!” The hole was made and Ray escaped through the opening. Ray would live to become a general in the War of 1812, and die on his farm in Mercer County, Kentucky, in 1835 at the age of seventy-five.

During this period of attacks, each fort sent out spies to range over the countryside to spot Indian movements. Simon Kenton and Thomas Brooks were chosen by Boone to act as spies for Boonesborough. Kenton could glide through the woods almost into the Indian camps unseen. Like George Washington, another giant of a man never wounded in battle, Kenton seemed to have a charmed life.

On May 23, 1777, Richard Callaway and John Todd left Boonesborough to represent the county of Kentucky in the Virginia legislature. With even fewer men at his disposal, Boone divided his force into two parties. While one worked the fields, plowing and planting crops, the other stood on guard, rifles loaded and primed, scanning the forest for movement. Boone often warned his men not to try to spot an Indian in the brush. He told them to look instead for the artificial straightness of a rifle barrel lying across a log or poking out of cover. Sure enough, as the men were busy in the cornfields, a guard at the fort saw the glint of the sun on a rifle and then spotted a force of
about two hundred Indians approaching. He gave the alarm and the workers ran for the fort as the Indians began shooting. Two men were wounded, but they made it back into the stockade. The large body of Indians kept up a fire against the fort for the rest of the day and into the night. They continued the attack the next day also and tried to set fire to the palisades.

Michael Stoner, though he had been wounded again the day before, watched an Indian approach with a torch and shot him. Boone, crippled with the broken ankle, took part, giving directions, keeping a lookout. A number of Indians were killed, and on May 25 they withdrew.

The strategy of the Shawnees, since they had a large war party, was to attack Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan’s Station by turns and sometimes simultaneously. On May 23, the same day they were raiding Boonesborough, the Indians attacked Logan’s Station also. The defenders there ran so low on lead that women melted down their pewter for bullets, and
two of the wives, both expert shots
, Esther Whitley and Jane Menifee, took their places at the loopholes and killed Indians along with the men. Sporadic attacks continued through May and June, and neither of the stations could go to the relief of the other. One of the residents at Boonesborough, William Bailey Smith, slipped out of the fort at night during an attack, to make his way all the way back to the Yadkin for help. After a head count in the spring of 1777,
Levi Todd reported that a total
of 102 men and boys in Kentucky County were able to bear arms.

In one of the attacks on Harrodsburg that spring, Hugh McGary had ridden out to find the mangled body of his stepson. The next day McGary spotted a Shawnee wearing the dead boy’s hunting shirt and killed him. McGary chopped the dead warrior’s body into pieces and fed them to his dogs. Gossips in the area later claimed that McGary was
visited by the “specter” of his stepson
, who rebuked him for his bad behavior.

In July 1777 Blackfish decided to give up his campaign in Kentucky. The Shawnees had lost dozens of warriors, and none of the stockades
had been taken. Laying siege to a fort was a new kind of warfare for the Shawnees, and they found that without artillery to blow apart the stockade, there was little chance of overrunning a fort. Their preference was for ambush, the hit-and-run, the harrying of smaller groups. Since they did not have cannon, there was little they could do to a well-built stockade, except kill livestock, destroy crops, and steal horses. The Indians could spread fear in the settlements, create hardship in an already hard lifestyle, and kill Kentuckians here and there, but so far they had failed to dislodge the determined settlers.

Most of the settlements in Kentucky at that time were called stations, not forts. The difference was not always of size, or even palisaded walls and blockhouses.
According to Nancy O’Malley
, forts were usually built by larger communities, including several families as well as single men, whereas stations were typically established by one extended family, involving relatives and friends. A fort was a public place, a station more a private community.

In August Col. John Bowman arrived under the auspices of the state of Virginia with a hundred militiamen and took over the defense of the forts. William Bailey Smith came back to Boonesborough from North Carolina with fifty extra men. Daniel Bryan, Boone’s nephew, was a member of that company. Later he told Draper, “
We were received with great joy
. We marched into Boonesborough single [file] giving six feet between Nose and tail of our horses this made a grand show to six indians that was laying hid on a hill overlooking the fort.” The Indians seem to have had Boonesborough under surveillance much of the time. It was reported that
cows were sometimes hesitant
to leave the fort in the morning when they sensed Indians about. In September the Kentucky County court convened again in Harrodsburg, and Boone was made a justice of the peace. These events suggested that peace and stability had returned to Kentucky.

But in the fall of 1777 something happened that guaranteed the conflict with the Indians would gather momentum, not lessen.
In November, Cornstalk
, a main Shawnee chief, and his son Elinipsico and
several companions, while on a peaceful mission, were murdered at Fort Randolph, at Point Pleasant on the Ohio River. Cornstalk, who had come to talk peace with the Americans, was thrown into jail and then killed. He had been the most peaceable of the Shawnee leaders. At the Battle of Point Pleasant in October 1774 Cornstalk had proven himself at least the equal of the white commanders. At the Treaty of Camp Charlotte in Ohio in October 1774 his eloquence, good sense, and charisma had been noted by all who attended. Draper tells us, “
When he arose, he was in nowise confused
or daunted, but spoke with distinct, audible voice, without stammering or repetition and with peculiar emphasis. His look[s] while addressing Dunmore were truly grand and majestic, yet graceful and attractive.” Later he had returned stolen horses to Virginians in an effort to maintain the peace. The killing of Cornstalk was a disaster for all concerned. “You may, by the Governor’s proclamation, know that the crime is to us an abhorrence; that a great reward is offered, and every method fallen upon to bring those people to Justice,” Col. William Fleming wrote to Blackfish and other Shawnee war chiefs. But Blackfish and Cornstalk’s successor, Moluntha, were experienced in the ways of the whites, and they knew no Virginian would ever be brought to justice for killing Cornstalk.

O
NCE THE
Virginia state legislature ruled Henderson’s claim to Kentucky null and void, Henderson and his partners closed the store at Boonesborough. Without a commissary the residents were soon short of trade goods. Stores on the Clinch and Holston rivers were more than two hundred miles away. Even if one had beaver skins, deer hides, and ginseng to trade, they had to be carried back over Boone’s Trace, through woods and thickets where Indians might be lurking.

By the fall of 1777 the residents of Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan’s Station, especially the women, were learning one of the basic tenets of frontier and southern Appalachian culture, “make do or do without.” Those who had brought clothes to the settlements soon wore them out clearing land, farming, chopping wood, and hunting
and had to rely on buckskin. It was said some left Boonesborough, not from fear of attack but because their vanity could not stand the conditions and shortage of clothes. There were so few women at the forts that the militia men, mostly young, longed for the comforts of home in Virginia.