Boone: A Biography (37 page)

It was Boone’s conduct at Detroit that caused forever after the question of his loyalty to the American cause. Both the Shawnees and the British governor made a great fuss over him. Hamilton gave Boone a horse and saddle and a supply of silver trinkets to use as money among the Indians. Hamilton was bribing Boone to join the Loyalist cause. In the display of entertaining Boone, it was clear the governor was also pumping him for information. Hamilton wanted to learn if the Indians knew about Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga the fall before, and Boone informed the governor they had been told of it.
Hamilton suggested that Boone tell
the Shawnees the story was just a joke, that of course the British had not been defeated by the rebels.

It is said that Boone carried with him all his life the certificate of his commission in 1774 as a captain of the Virginia militia, signed by Lord Dunmore. Even while dressed as an Indian among the Shawnees, he carried the document everywhere with him. During his interview with Hamilton, Boone showed him the commission and apparently hinted that he was sympathetic to the Tory cause, and that he might persuade the settlers at Boonesborough to surrender the fort and transfer their loyalties to the British. Boone was willing to let Hamilton believe what
he wanted to believe. His duplicity was certainly in his interest, and he was treated handsomely. Boone knew how to conceal himself in the wilderness, and he was also an expert at hiding his feelings when in danger. In the long run his stealth proved to be in the interest of Boonesborough, for he survived to return and warn and fortify and save the settlement.

Boone was a complex man with large sympathies, and like a good actor he could assume almost any point of view. He could reflect the manners and opinions of those he was with, whether Shawnees or British officers, Spanish officials, or rough backwoodsmen. He could charm people and persuade. As John Mack Faragher puts it, “
Like the great hunter he was
, Boone’s greatest talent was his ability to blend in with his surroundings.”

The more one studies Boone the more one suspects that he genuinely appreciated others’ perspectives and values. That was why he could play his ruses so convincingly. At some level he was not faking it. He genuinely understood the position of Governor Hamilton, who stood for British law and order, custom and tradition. And he understood the position of Chief Blackfish trying to lead his tribe toward survival and a future, and he understood the grand dreams and illusions of Richard Henderson as well.

Certainly Boone charmed Governor Hamilton, and Hamilton charmed him also. Boone later said he and the other prisoners “
were treated by Governor Hamilton
. . . with great humanity.” Boone further impressed the governor by demonstrating that he knew how to make gunpowder. While locked in his room with the necessary ingredients he made a supply of the explosive, adding yet another detail to the later reports that he gave aid to the enemy.

On April 25, 1778, Governor Hamilton wrote to his commander, General Carlton, in Canada: “
By Boone’s account the people of the frontier
have been so incessantly harassed by parties of Indians they have not been able to sow grain and at Kentucke will not have a morsel of bread by the middle of June. Clothing is not to be had, nor do
they expect relief from Congress—their dilemma will probably induce them to trust to the savages who have shown so much humanity to their prisoners & come to this place before winter.” Boone had let Hamilton think just what the governor wanted to think.

Blackfish refused all the offers of the British to buy Boone. One reason was that the chief needed Boone as guide and negotiator for the planned attack on Boonesborough that spring. After all, Boone had promised to deliver Boonesborough to the Shawnees when they returned to Kentucky. A hundred pounds sterling for his adopted son was nothing compared to the honor to be won by expunging the settlements from the Great Meadow hunting grounds.

Blackfish and his party left Detroit on April 10, with Boone riding the horse Hamilton had given him. On the return journey they stopped at villages on the Huron River and the Scioto, notifying Delawares, Mingoes, and Shawnees to assemble that spring for the raid on Kentucky. Despite the hardships of the journey, Boone was delighted anew by the beauty of the Ohio country in spring. He and many others found the river valleys of Ohio unsurpassed, even by Kentucky. In Draper’s words, “
Such a country could not well escape
his keen observation, for he loved to feast his soul upon nature in all her beautiful varieties.”

W
HILE
B
OONE
and the others were away in Detroit, the salt boiler Andrew Johnson had escaped from Chillicothe. Johnson had convinced the Shawnees he was retarded and confused and afraid of guns, and they had protected him, calling him Pecula, or “Little Duck.” When they found he had disappeared they expressed concern for his safety, certain that he had gotten lost and would die in the woods. Boone told them, now that Johnson had gone, that in fact he was an excellent woodsman and marksman. Johnson not only made his way back to Harrodsburg, but also led a raid into Ohio, now that he knew where the Shawnee towns were. Many of the horses in Kentucky had been stolen by the Shawnees, and Johnson and his party recovered seven
mounts and returned with them across the Ohio River. When Blackfish heard of the exploit he asked Boone who could possibly have found the Shawnee towns, for no white man knew their location. “Pecula,” Boone answered.
“No,” answered Blackfish
, “. . . for he was a fool and could never have reached Kentucky.” Boone explained to the incredulous chief that Little Duck was far from a fool. At that point Blackfish realized that though the Shawnees had taken many prisoners at the Blue Licks, they had also revealed the location of their towns to the Kentuckians. It was more important than ever that the forts in Kentucky be destroyed. A real weakness of the Shawnees, as it turned out, was their assumption of superiority to the whites as woodsmen and scouts. Again and again they paid for that pride. Boone later said, “
Never did the Indians pursue
so disastrous a policy as when they captured me and my salt-boilers, and taught us, what we did not know before, the way to their towns and the geography of their country.”

Not only did Andrew Johnson tell the people back in Kentucky where the Shawnee towns were on the Little Miami River, but he told them Boone had arranged the surrender of all the salt boilers, had been adopted by Blackfish, was happy and cheerful among the Indians as a pig in mud and had promised to surrender Boonesborough to the Shawnees when they returned in the spring. It was Johnson’s report that planted the rumors that Boone was a traitor.

B
OONE LATER
told Filson his months with the Shawnees were mostly a pleasure, and there is no reason to doubt him. “
At Chelicothe I spent my time
as comfortably as I could expect; was adopted, according to their custom, into a family where I became a son, and had a great share in the affection of my new parents, brothers, sisters, and friends. I was exceedingly familiar and friendly with them, always appearing as chearful and satisfied as possible, and they put great confidence in me.” It was a life of hunting and trapping and fishing, in the beautiful Ohio country. As the son of the honored chief, he was treated with courtesy. Once when Boone tried to help out in the cornfields,
Blackfish told him he didn’t need to work. His “mother” would grow enough corn for all of them. And when the rest of Boone’s family arrived she would grow enough corn for them too. It is possible that Boone took a Shawnee wife, though we have no evidence of this. He would have been expected to take a wife at some point. The Shawnee population was being depleted, and he would have been urged to do his duty. He was a great favorite among his adoptive sisters, and they never forgot their fondness for Sheltowee, even in their old age. Boone’s great-granddaughter wrote, “
Grandfather Boone said he had a squaw
that claimed him as her buck; said she mended and dried his leggins and patched his moccasins.” We know Boone had a particular ability to adapt himself to circumstances. There are stories that he had much earlier taken a Cherokee wife. For some historians it is hard to imagine that he could have lived with the Shawnees for four months without taking a wife. Much of what we know about Indian marriages and lovemaking suggests it. Most Shawnee marriages were arranged by the parents, but sometimes young people took matters into their own hands also. “
Should a maiden like the looks
or the manner of a young brave she might seek a place behind him in the dance, . . . and give him her hand without a handkerchief. The giving of the naked hand always denoted a ‘willingness’ to be regarded as a future mate,” the Shawnee Thomas Wildcat Alford later wrote. According to C. C. Trowbridge in
Shawnese Traditions
, it was not uncommon for a man to marry a widow and her daughter. “
But these are cases only
when a young man marries a widow, and then, finding herself in danger of being abandoned by her husband, she proposes to him a connection with her daughter & thus the connection is preserved.”

When a man and woman in the tribe first married they would move into their own shelter. It was understood they needed privacy to begin their life together. Later they might live in a cabin or shelter with a large family and almost never be alone with each other again. But at the beginning it was recognized they needed private space for bonding and lovemaking. Shawnees usually married in their teens, and if a boy
and girl were very young and inexperienced they were instructed in the details of lovemaking by the boy’s mother. “
She helped her son get an erection
. . . Properly she directed his penis to the woman’s vaginal orifice,” the anthropologist Voegelin was told. Once the lovemaking began she left them “to follow exactly the way it was arranged for them, the way they ought to follow, the way it was intended for them.”
Too frequent sex was considered bad
for the husband’s health.
Shawnee couples were not supposed to demonstrate
affection in public, however passionate they were in private.

Irish men were especially popular with Indian women, who seemed to prefer red hair above all other colors. About half the Cherokee nation, for example, would eventually come to have Hibernian names. Among some nations “
sex could be a way of fulfilling
sacred obligations of hospitality, a way of transferring supernatural powers, a way of incorporating strangers into kinship and trade networks,” Carolyn Gilman tells us. One way to acquire the medicine of a stranger was through copulation. The races mingled so quickly on meeting it appears to have been almost love at first sight.

John Lawson, who studied several of the tribes in North Carolina earlier in the eighteenth century reported, “
He that is a good Hunter never
misses of being a Favorite amongst the Women; the prettiest Girls being always bestowed upon the chiefest Sports-Men.” Lawson observed that a man who did not sleep with the women was held in contempt by the tribe. “
For when a Person
that lives amongst them, is reserved from the Conversation of their Women, tis impossible for him to ever accomplish his Designs amongst the People.” But in the crowded tents and bark lodges, as in the settlers’ cabins, there was not always room for such preferred lovemaking. Lying among many others, couples moved as best they could under a blanket or buffalo hide, women on top at times, men at others, or side by side, loving silently and patiently. As a seminomadic people, Indians had birthrates lower than the whites. For people who hunted and gathered and moved often,
nature favored smaller families. With some nations lovemaking was almost a seasonal thing, not a nightly or habitual practice.

The Shawnee supreme deity was female, called Our Grandmother, creator of people and the universe. She presided over fertility, the corn harvest, and the destiny of the people. In some stories the deity was portrayed as having two faces, one beautiful and seductive, the other ugly and vengeful. She could offer love and then turn on a miscreant with fury. One of the Shawnee legends concerns a man, who, looking for his wife, comes to a cornfield:

Perhaps he was lucky he came
, for in that place corn is growing which is of curious shape. The thing which he found looked like a woman’s vagina. Now he said he heard about her; the man always heard, he said. There is a saying that the Corn Person, our mother, is a woman; if it is really true that she is called this name, she will be embarrassed now when I have intercourse with her. Then he pulled out his penis; he stuck it right there where she was cracked. After he had intercourse with her, then from there he went to the house. Now the Corn Person went away along through the night. Now the old woman who stays there rose early in the morning; right now she went to the corn crib when she arose. When she arrived over there, there wasn’t any corn.

The symbolic possession of the tribe, and the tribe’s covenant with the female deity, was the holy bundle. Wherever the people moved, they carried the holy bundle with them. As the anthropologist Voegelin and his colleagues discovered, “
The bundles provide
the most sacred approach to Our Grandmother . . . Conversely, the bundles provide for extremely holy, possibly esoteric communications from the Creator to the Shawnee. The bundles are a holy mystery and attract the inarticulate interest of the whole tribe.” The medicine bundle might contain sacred plants, talismanic objects such a pieces of a dead snake, which
“
gave access to the chaotic and deadly
chthonic forces,” as Gregory Dowd puts it. The bundle in each town had its own appointed custodian, who consulted it as a source of wisdom and prophecy. “
Daniel Boone evidently saw it
among the Chillicothes in 1778 and thought it ‘a kind of ark, deemed among the sacred things.’” Each village also had a ceremonial hoop, with packets of seeds and animal hair attached to it, symbolizing the male and female division of labor, and used especially in the Spring Bread Dance to “
function as a prayer
to Our Grandmother, the Creator, for good crops and abundant game.”