Boone: A Biography (42 page)

During the attack, the cattle inside the Boonesborough stockade had been given meager rations. A good many of the livestock had been killed by enemy fire and eaten by the defenders of the fort. The cows and horses, hogs and chickens, that had survived were half starved, and as soon as it was clear the Shawnees were gone, men hurried out into the gardens that were left and gathered cabbages to feed the stock. Some cattle outside had been killed by the Indians, and others were taken when the Shawnees withdrew.
At least one cow that was led away
got loose and returned to the fort a few days later with the strap of buffalo hide tied to her horns dragging behind her.

The people of Boonesborough stepped out of the stockade into the open carefully, blinking to see if their freedom and survival were real. A sweet wind leaned across the peach orchard where so many Shawnees had camped. They inspected the collapsed tunnel from the river that had come so close to the fort’s wall. Some think that
if Boonesborough had fallen
, the other forts in Kentucky would likely have been taken also. The British and their Indians allies would have been free to attack the western settlements of North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Boone sat down to write to Rebecca back in North Carolina to tell her of the ordeal and survival of the settlement. He told her that they had lost two men, Bundrin and London, and that four people had been wounded, including himself, Jemima, Squire, and Pemberton Rollins, who had had his arm broken by a bullet. He estimated that the Shawnees had lost thirty-seven braves. In the letter, Boone described his months of captivity with the Shawnees, his daring escape, and the intervening months while Boonesborough prepared for the attack. He told her he would return to North Carolina for his family as soon as he could, but at the moment he had to defend himself against a charge of treason from Richard Callaway and Benjamin Logan. A court-martial had been scheduled and officers of the recently arrived Virginia militia would hear the case. Boone showed his anger against the British, swearing uncharacteristically in the letter to Rebecca. “
Goddamn them,” he wrote
, “they had set the Indians on us.” Daniel Bryan, Rebecca’s cousin, recalled the sentence many years later, and he remembered that Rebecca was so offended by the profanity, she had the oath cut out of the letter after it was read to her and burned it. Others present also recalled that Boone mentioned the court-martial in the letter.

When Boone talked to Filson five years afterward, he neglected to refer to the trial for treason. It was probably the greatest humiliation of his life, and he rarely talked about it later. After his extraordinary efforts to save Boonesborough from attack in February, to save the salt boilers at the Blue Licks, run the gauntlet, play his maneuver with
Blackfish and the British at Detroit, escape and walk back to Boonesborough in four days, furiously complete the fortification of Boonesborough, lead a dangerous scouting raid into Ohio, and finally organize and supervise the defense through an eleven-day siege, he was to be tried for attempting to betray the settlement.

A few days after the siege ended, Kenton and Alexander Montgomery returned from Ohio, where Boone had left them to scout and spy on the Shawnees. And a company of militia arrived from Virginia to relieve the three forts. But it is likely Boone was mostly occupied with the approaching court-martial. We know the details of the courtmartial proceedings because a young trader named Daniel Trabue was present at Logan’s Station when it occurred. Trabue wrote an account of his time in Kentucky, and the account was preserved and is now published. When the court-martial was held at Logan’s Station, a number of settlers from the region attended. Out of loyalty to Boone, few ever mentioned it later, and apparently the records of the proceedings were destroyed.
According to Trabue, the charges brought
by Callaway and Logan were (in Draper’s transcription):

1. That Boone had taken twenty-six men to make salt at the Blue Licks, and the Indians had caught him trapping for beaver ten miles below the Licking, and [he] voluntarily surrendered his men at the Licks to the enemy.

2. That when a prisoner, he engaged with Governor Hamilton to surrender the people of Boonesborough, to be removed to Detroit, and live under British protection and jurisdiction.

3. That returning from captivity, he encouraged a party of men to accompany him to the Paint Lick Town, weakening the garrison at a time when the arrival of an Indian army was daily expected to attack the fort.

4. That preceding the attack on Boonesborough, he was willing to take the officers of the fort, on pretense of making peace, to the Indian camp beyond the protection of guns of the garrison.

In conclusion Colonel Callaway charged that Boone favored the British cause and had used every opportunity to further the Tory effort. He urged that Boone be stripped of his commission in the Kentucky County militia.

Boone remained silent while all the charges were made. Finally, he rose to defend himself, explaining that he had surrendered the men at the Blue Licks in February to save their lives. “
Capt. Daniel Boon sayed the reason he
give up these men at the blue licks was that the Indeans told him they were going to Boonsbourough to take the fort. Boon said he thought he would use some stratigem.” Otherwise they would have been killed and Boonesborough attacked when it was defenseless. It was true he had pretended friendship with the British at Detroit but only as a way of buying time and saving himself and the other prisoners. He had made the expedition to Paint Lick Town to find out where the Shawnees were. He had negotiated with Blackfish outside the stockade to buy time. His men had never been beyond the rifle range from the fort, as was proved in the melee after the final negotiation. His escape from the Shawnees, his rebuilding of the fort, his actions during the siege, proved his loyalty to Boonesborough and the American cause.

After Boone made his presentation, the presiding officers deliberated among themselves. The accusers, Boone, those looking on, waited in the charged air. In a short while the officers pronounced Boone innocent of all charges. To show their respect for him and his actions in the defense of Boonesborough, they recommended that he be promoted to the rank of major. Almost everyone there, except Callaway and Logan, and perhaps Andrew Johnson, who had spread the rumor of Boone’s treachery in the first place, was happy with the outcome. As far as we know Boone never spoke to Callaway again. When he returned to Kentucky the next year, he moved six miles north of Boonesborough and cleared a new place in the wilderness called Boone’s Station.

Trabue’s final comment on the court-martial was, “
Boon after that time appeared alwaise to be
on the side of this government. How ever,
Col. Calleway and Capt. Ben Logan was not pleased about it.” One of the best statements of support for Boone at this time came from Simon Kenton, who knew the complex dangers of the frontier as well as anyone. When told of the accusations against Boone his response was quick. “
With an emphatic nod of his head
he replied, ‘They may say what they please of Daniel Boone, he acted with wisdom in that matter.’”

While the characterization of Richard Callaway that has come down to us is of a quarrelsome, defensive man, he was also recognized as bold and brave, instrumental in the survival of Boonesborough. And Benjamin Logan was one of the notable men of his time, rising to high rank in the militia, almost elected governor of Kentucky later. It is important to consider what it was about Boone that irritated and aroused the suspicions of these men so thoroughly. Certainly his familiarity with Indians made him suspect. But Logan and Callaway may have sensed that in some ways Boone, like other gifted and innovative people, played the role of double agent throughout much of his life. It could be said that in that doubleness, seeing the world at once from two or more points of view and acting on that multiple vision, lies the very essence of originality and greatness. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in
The Crack-up
, “
The test of a first-rate intelligence
is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” It was possibly this difference, this knack for dealing with Indians, this doubleness, that made men such as Callaway and Logan suspect and despise Boone. Complex and original people know that truth is rarely simple, almost never all of this or all of that, but elusive minglings and mixtures, evolving shapes, with tinctures of irony and paradox. Boone’s actions often reveal his understanding and even relish for the complexity and shadings of experience. He could not have played the roles he did if at times he had not been essentially an Indian, at other times a patient, solitary explorer, and beholder of the wild, and at other times still a leader of settlers, a surveyor, trader, soldier, legislator.

Though Richard Callaway would be killed by Indians within eighteen months, his body scalped and mutilated and rolled into a mud hole, the Callaway family kept stories of Boone’s alleged treason alive for the next century. In all their versions of Boone’s offenses, it was his ease and friendliness with the Indians that figured most prominently in their accusations. His friendship with the Shawnees was usually advanced as evidence of his disloyalty to the American cause, as if no one who got along so well with Indians was to be trusted. The fact of his friendship with Blackfish was evidence enough of treachery. “
Boon never deserved anything of the country
,” Callaway’s daughter Kezia would later say. The dream of cooperation and peace between whites and Indians that Cornstalk and Boone and many others had shared was lost forever in the rage of the Revolution, in the fires fanned by the British on the frontier, and in the greed and fear of the relentless stream of settlers into the western lands.

A
S SOON
as he was acquitted and promoted at Logan’s Station, Boone made preparations to go to his family on the Yadkin. And as he traveled east he met a company of militia on their way to reinforce the settlements in Kentucky. He stopped at Watauga and encouraged his old friend James Robertson to migrate to the western region. Robertson would eventually settle at French Lick on the Cumberland River, under the auspices of the Transylvania Company, and found the settlement that would become Nashville, rising to be one of the leading men of Tennessee. Traveling with Boone to the Yadkin were Jemima and Flanders Callaway and his son-in-law William Hays.

Boone and his party reached the Yadkin by November 9, 1778, but we have few details of the reunion. He and his large family lived that winter in a cabin that belonged to Billy Bryan, husband of Boone’s sister Mary. Billy was also Rebecca’s uncle. That winter Boone hunted in the nearby hills and mountains, familiar to him from his youth.

There has been much speculation about trouble between Daniel and Rebecca that winter. Speaking to Filson, Boone would only say,
“
The history of my going home
, and returning with my family, forms a series of difficulties, an account of which would swell a volume.” Nathan Boone, who was not even born until almost three years later, said the differences between Rebecca and Daniel at that time were caused by her reluctance to return to Kentucky. This explanation is certainly plausible. She had endured three years of hardship in Kentucky, lost her oldest son to Indians, survived one major attack on Boonesborough in 1777, assumed that she had returned to North Carolina a widow with a family of many children. She had already survived more than most women might in several lifetimes. Why would she want to go back to Kentucky, however enthusiastic and committed to the settlement there Daniel was? Some have implied that this was the time when Rebecca presented Boone with the “surprise” baby that could not possibly have been his. But this suggestion confuses two different periods in the Boones’ marriage, his supposed return to Virginia in 1762 and his return from Boonesborough in 1778. No child was born to Rebecca between 1775 and 1781. Others have suggested that Rebecca’s Tory sympathies made her reluctant to return to Kentucky. Some of her kin were committed to the Loyalist cause and a few fought for the British. After Boone’s disappearance and presumed death, they might have persuaded her of the rightness of the royal cause. On the other hand, no one ever reported Rebecca making a statement of sympathy for the British side.

It is possible that rumors of Boone taking a Shawnee wife in Chillicothe had reached Rebecca’s ears. When Andrew Johnson returned to Harrodsburg and Boonesborough and told everyone how happy Boone was among the Shawnees, he may have added that detail. Imagine a wife, worried about her missing husband, hearing that he is living content among the Shawnees, adopted by the chief, with an Indian bride. There is no firm evidence that this happened, but it is possible that it did, or that Rebecca thought that it did. If this was the case, she may have taken it badly, having already heard of his friendly relations with the Indians and his life of ease and privilege among the Shawnees.

What is certain is that Boone spent much of the winter, spring, and summer recruiting families to resettle in Kentucky. It was one of his special gifts. He was always able to persuade others to join his moves to new lands. His enthusiasm, confidence, and charisma were brought out by this activity. He was a storyteller who inspired others with his tales of adventure, of the wonderful land across the mountains, and the promise of a glorious future. Rebecca may have looked upon her husband, for a time, as a kind of Pied Piper, who led others to danger and their doom.

1779–1782

In the years 1780–82, as Boone became in succession a land locator, or “jobber,” a legislator, and a licensed surveyor, his vision of life in the wilderness of Kentucky was complicated by conflicting land claims, continued Indian raids, lawsuits, theft of a considerable sum of money he carried for others. Boone’s sense of purpose and calling was challenged, diverted, and blurred, as he found himself involved in businesses for which he was not suited, in disputes that puzzled and embarrassed him. What had promised to be a simple life of hunting and trapping and locating land for others became a series of aggravations, failures. The new life he sought for himself and his family proved to be elusive. And in the background loomed the larger conflict of the Revolution, with the British and their Indian allies determined to drive the Americans out of Kentucky.