Boone: A Biography (45 page)

H
ART’S GENEROUS
testimonial to Boone’s character rings with conviction. It squares with everything we know about Boone’s actions, then and later. He had known the Harts since his days on the Yadkin. The integrity and goodwill he seemed to bring to his business make even sadder the defeats he suffered again and again in his ventures. A similar pattern can be seen in the lives of other frontiersmen. The famous scout Simon Kenton ended his life of daring exploits and notable successes with little wealth to show for all his deeds.
Likewise with the most famous
man on the Kentucky frontier after Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark.

It is likely that Boone visited Lt. Gov. Henry Hamilton in prison on this trip to Williamsburg. Hamilton had been escorted to the capital by Richard Callaway along with other prisoners taken by George Rogers Clark at Vincennes the year before. Hamilton was brutally treated, kept in a cold, filthy dungeon because of the perhaps exaggerated reports of him buying Kentucky scalps from Indians. After he
was released Hamilton wrote an account of the incarceration, and the visit by Boone: “
A Major [Boone] and thirty-seven Americans
with their arms fell into the hands of a party of Indians, not one of whom was put to death, and the very officer having escaped from them, had the generosity to go to Williamsburg at the time I was confined in the dungeon there to remonstrate against the injustice and inhumanity of the Governor [Jefferson] and Council of Virginia.”

T
HE WORLD
that Boone had found in Kentucky in 1769 was beginning to fade away. In May of 1779 Col. John Bowman of the Virginia militia had led a force of three hundred men across the Ohio to attack Shawnee towns. In a dawn raid on Chillicothe, Blackfish was wounded. But a number of Shawnees had already moved farther north and west. On that raid Bowman lost nine of his men and killed only two Shawnees. But Blackfish, or Cottawamago, died of his wounds a short time later. The great leader, Boone’s adopted father, was gone. In his account of the expedition Daniel Trabue wrote that Bowman “
made a broken trip of it
, got some of our best men killed, and killed very few Indians.”

Conditions in Kentucky worsened in 1780. Hunters and settlers continued to be killed. Many simply disappeared. “
Hardly a week passes without someone
being scalped between this and the Falls,” John Floyd wrote to Col. William Preston on May 31, 1780, “and I have almost got too cowardly to travel about the woods without company.” Not only was Kentucky changing quickly, but the Shawnee world that Boone had gotten to know in 1778 was rapidly ceasing to exist. Along with the buffalo, the Indian survivors were moving westward in front of the relentless wave of settlers. They still made raids into Kentucky, but their beautiful towns, so gracefully situated and constructed on the Scioto and Little Miami rivers, were becoming ghost towns, soon to be plowed under by the first generation of white farmers.

A number of Shawnees, encouraged by the British, were still determined to resist the settlements in Kentucky. On June 24 and 25,
1780, respectively, a force of Indians, with British soldiers who did have artillery, captured both Ruddle’s and Martin’s stations and took many prisoners. After the forts fell, Henry Bird, the British commander, was unable to prevent his Indian allies from abusing, torturing, and murdering prisoners. On the march to Ohio many of the prisoners, in George Morgan Chinn’s words, “
fell by the wayside and were
summarily relieved of their suffering by the tomahawk.” Captain Bird claimed later to be appalled by the cruelty of his Indian allies and, unable to prevent the prolonged torture, cut short the campaign. Had Bird continued the expedition with his artillery he might have taken most of the forts in Kentucky.

To answer successful raids by the British and Indians on Ruddle’s Station and Martin’s Station in Kentucky, and devastating attacks on travelers on the Ohio River, George Rogers Clark organized an army of eleven hundred in the summer of 1780 to return to Ohio. Boone, eighteen years older than Clark, agreed to serve as a scout. On August 1 the Americans crossed the Ohio and headed north. They found Chillicothe deserted and burned to the ground. The remaining Shawnees had retreated north to the town of Piqua. As the Americans approached, the Shawnees at Piqua killed many of the prisoners they had taken at Ruddle’s and Martin’s stations. Both sides fought with a fury many present had never seen. The Americans killed and took scalps and even ripped scalps from bodies in graves.
One witness reported seeing a woman’s belly
ripped open and her body “otherwise” mangled. After an intense and sustained battle, the Shawnees pulled back from Piqua and the Americans looted and burned the town and surrounding cornfields. Clark and his men returned to Kentucky feeling they had avenged the raids on Ruddle’s and Martin’s stations. The Shawnees moved farther north and built new towns.

It was a time of increased violence along the Ohio River. “Once a keelboat came floating down the Ohio River ‘with every person on it dead,’ Benjamin Allen remembered.
‘Found an Indian’s fingers in it
that had been chopped off.’”

T
HE RAIDS
into Kentucky by scattered bands of Indians continued. In March 1780 Col. Richard Callaway, Boone’s old nemesis, had been killed as he attempted to build a ferry with his slaves for use on the Kentucky River near Boonesborough. He had escorted Henry “Hair Buyer” Hamilton as a prisoner to Williamsburg and while in the capital had secured the valuable ferry contract from the government of Virginia. “
In the town of Boonesborough
, in the county of Kentucky, across the Kentucky River to the land on the opposite shore, the price for a man three shillings and for a horse the same, the keeping of which last mentioned ferry and emoluments arising therefrom, are hereby given to Richard Callaway.” His body was scalped and disfigured, thrown into a sinkhole. Hunters at this time were attacked in the woods almost daily.

Much of the lore about Boone’s resourcefulness has its origins in this period. In one of the best-known tales, Boone is growing tobacco at his new claim at Boone’s Station. As Peck tells the story, “
At a short distance from his cabin
, he had raised a small patch of tobacco to supply his neighbors, (for Boone never used the ‘filthy weed’ himself) the amount perhaps of one hundred and fifty hills.” Some have said that Rebecca smoked tobacco in a pipe. It is late summer and he is hanging racks of tobacco leaves high in his barn to cure when four Shawnee warriors appear below. “
Yes, Boone, we have got you again
,” they say. “We carry you off to Chillicothe this time.” Boone greets them warmly and tells them how glad he is to see his Shawnee brothers again. High on the racks above them he grabs a great armful of dusty, drying tobacco and hurls it down into their faces below. Stunned and blinded, the Shawnees cough and stumble, wiping the stinging dust from their eyes as Boone jumps down and runs to his cabin for his rifle. “
The old man, in telling the story
, imitated their gestures and tones of voice with great glee.” Nathan Boone, talking with Lyman Draper years later, discounted the story, saying that neither his father nor his mother
ever used tobacco in any form
.

That summer of 1780 Boone and a large party of men hunted deer
south of the Kentucky River. So many settlers had poured into Kentucky that cloth was very scarce. They needed the deer hides to make buckskin clothes. One evening by the campfire Boone warned that he heard or sensed Indians nearby. He quietly directed his men to roll up some of the hides they had taken in blankets and arrange them around the campfire, then hide in the trees with their rifles. All night they waited and near dawn shots were fired, thudding into the blankets.
Then the Shawnees rushed into the camp
with their tomahawks and were killed or routed by the hidden hunters.

While hunting by himself
on Slate Creek, Boone was fired upon and he jumped into the nearest thicket and worked his way downstream into a canebrake. Holding his rifle aimed at an opening where he was sure the Indian would appear, he was taken aback to see two warriors emerge from the woods. If he shot one, he could be killed by the other before he could reload. Pondering what he might do, he waited until the Indians were in line, one behind the other. Taking careful aim, he killed one and wounded the other, who dropped his gun and fled. Boone took the better Indian rifle and threw the other away. Since Boone later claimed he was sure he had killed only one Indian in his life, this story is probably not true.

The stories about Boone continued to multiply. Boone himself told anecdotes and created anecdotes that became the stuff of legend. But stories about some figures spread and grow, are repeated and multiplied, as naturally as honeysuckle covers a road bank. It is a phenomenon well known in all cultures and times. The things most of us do are forgotten, however novel or exceptional they may seem at the time. But for some, their every act seems to generate a legend that thrives like a seed in rich soil. At some point whether the story is true or not doesn’t much matter. It’s the color, the novelty, the twist, that counts. The hero is mostly a name to which the deeds and exploits, qualities of character, can be attached. The figure becomes a springboard for the folk imagination, for collective memory and record of a culture. In early American frontier history the two figures who seemed to catch
the folk imagination most intensely were Daniel Boone and John Chapman, or Johnny Appleseed. In both cases the subjects were real historical figures who did many unusual things. But in the folk imagination, they quickly became symbolic, exemplars of deeds and characteristics a culture aspired to and wanted to be remembered for. The stories of figures like Boone and Chapman help keep a culture alive and help people remember who they are, or at least who they would like to be.

One of the stories about Boone rooted all too much in fact occurred in October 1780. Returning from Clark’s raid into Ohio, Daniel and his younger brother Ned stopped to rest their horses, loaded with game killed on the way home. While they paused in a meadow, Ned suggested they crack some walnuts or hickory nuts ripening in a grove nearby. Boone warned that this was a place where they were likely to see Indians. Ned teased Daniel for his fear and began to crack nuts on a rock. While Ned was occupied, Boone saw a bear in the woods, followed and shot it. “
Edward [Ned] sat down to crack
some hickory nuts—a bear came Near by them[.] Danl. Took his Rifle ran & shot the bear.” Suddenly shots rang out in the woods and Boone realized they had walked into such an ambush as he had feared. Looking back, he saw Shawnees gathered around Ned’s body. “
We have killed Daniel Boone
,” he heard one of the braves exclaim. The legend was that even Rebecca said Ned looked very much like Daniel.

Boone had no choice but to run and hide in a canebrake. The Shawnees sent their dog into the cane for Boone and he had to kill the dog and fade farther into the brake. Lying flat, he watched as the Shawnees found their dead dog, cursed the thicket, and turned away. After all, why risk hunting through the cane when they had just killed the great Daniel Boone. Running all night, Daniel reached Boone’s Station by morning and without pause organized a party to return to the scene of Ned’s death. As they approached the nut trees, they saw a wildcat eating Ned’s flesh. Daniel Bryan later said that Ned’s head had been cut off by the Shawnees as evidence that they had really killed Daniel
Boone,
but it is more likely they just took his scalp
. Boone and his men followed the trail of the Shawnees all the way to the Ohio River. But it was too late; the warriors had already crossed. On the way back to Boone’s Station, Daniel and his son Israel and a nephew-in-law named Peter Scholl stopped near the Blue Licks to kill game for Ned’s widow, Martha, sister of Rebecca, and mother of five children.

With the death of Ned, Boone assumed an even larger responsibility as head of the extended family. His many obligations as provider and protector no doubt made it seem even more necessary to add the profits of locating and surveying land to his income as hunter and trapper and farmer. And to his already multiple tasks he soon added another: legislator. He was elected to represent Kentucky in the Virginia legislature when the session was convened the next spring.

By then, the Virginia legislature met in Richmond, not colonial Williamsburg. The session opened May 7, 1781, but soon had to be adjourned, as Cornwallis and the British army were approaching the city on the James. The feared cavalry commander Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, “Bloody Tarleton,” was directed to capture the lawmakers. Tarleton had made his reputation in the Carolinas, where he never took prisoners. “Tarleton’s Quarter,” the Overmountain Men had shouted at Kings Mountain October 7, 1780, meaning, “We won’t take prisoners either.”

As Tarleton and his dragoons approached Charlottesville, the legislators slipped away to the west. Boone and a friend from Kentucky, John Jouett, stayed behind to save some of the horses. Horses were much sought after by the invading army. As Boone and his friend rode away from Charlottesville on June 4, 1781, they were overtaken by a unit of dragoons. Dressed in his hunting clothes, Boone was not suspected of being a lawmaker, and chatted several minutes with the commander, possibly Tarleton himself. When they came to a fork in the road, John Jouett, hoping to get away from the British, thoughtlessly said, “
Wait a minute, Captain Boone, and I’ll go
with you.” They were arrested and put in prison.

Boone was kept under arrest for a while with other local officials and then given a parole. One story is that he was locked in a coal house and passed the time by singing, as he had often done alone in the wilderness.
Col. William Preston wrote to John Floyd
on June 17, 1781, from Fort Chiswell, Virginia, that Boone had been taken prisoner. In any case, Boone was let go in a few days, and there has been a good deal of speculation ever since about why he was released so quickly. His descendants said Boone had to swear an oath to never take up arms against the Crown again. Detractors have pointed to the oath as yet another example of Boone’s willingness to cooperate with the British when it suited him, evidence of his opportunistic, wishy-washy character. Others have suggested it was Rebecca’s Loyalist relatives who got Boone released so quickly. Nathan Boone, our best source for many aspects of Boone’s life, merely said, “
My father was conveyed to the British
camp and put into a coal house . . . He very probably explained his title of captain by referring to his old Dunmore commission. My father also may have pretended contentment and sung songs while confined.” Someone hearing the story in the nineteenth century would have thought of Paul and Silas, described in Acts 16:25 as jailed for preaching and singing hymns in chains until an earthquake shook down the jail and freed them. “
Boone was reimbursed for his trouble
and attendance of the Legislature 2900 pounds of tobacco.”