Boone: A Biography (53 page)

Col. Thomas Kennedy attacked a group of running women with his sword, including a captive white girl. The other men began to tease him, yelling, “
Who hacked the squaws?
Who hacked the squaws?” And then one would answer, “Tom Kennedy.” The Kentuckians grabbed pots of mush and stew cooking over fires and devoured them. In one pot they found a turtle boiled whole, and some men who had already eaten from the pot lost their stomachs. As Boone and Simon Kenton and their company rode into the village, Boone spied a familiar warrior. “
Mind that fellow,” Boone shouted
. “I know him—it’s Big Jim, who killed my son in Powell’s Valley.” In the past thirteen years Big Jim’s reputation as a murderer and torturer had grown. Hearing his name called, Big Jim wheeled around and shot one of Boone’s party just as he himself was hit with a bullet. As the Kentuckians, perhaps thinking Big Jim was dead, went to the aid of their wounded comrade, Big Jim rose from the grass, reloaded his rifle, and shot another Kentuckian. While Big Jim was reloading yet again, Simon Kenton charged through the grass and drove his hunting knife into the Shawnee’s heart. The Kentuckians scalped Big Jim and slashed his body while Boone stood by in a daze.

The raid was not a particular success. More Kentuckians were killed than Indians, and most of the Shawnees had fled. Ironically, among those killed were several chiefs who had tried to make peace with the Americans. A number of prisoners were rounded up, mostly women and children. The plan had been to take hostages who could later be traded for American prisoners the Indians held. Among those captured was Moluntha who, instead of running, held up the American flag and a copy of the treaty he had signed earlier that year. Thinking he was protected by the document, his cocked hat, and his white official robe, he surrendered himself and his extended family, including a
leading woman of the tribe named Nonhelema, sister of the late chief, Cornstalk. Because of her imposing manner and tall figure—some accounts say she was six and a half feet tall—Americans had labeled her the Grenadier Squaw. Such prisoners were very valuable in the economy of prisoner exchange and peace negotiations.

Later that day, in the aftermath of the attack, Boone and other Kentuckians were chatting with the prisoners, probably in a combination of Shawnee, English, and sign language. A pipe was passed around and no doubt Boone and Moluntha mentioned the old days at Chillicothe when Boone was Sheltowee, Blackfish’s son. Boone had a knack for this kind of wilderness courtesy, an example of his respect for Indians, and indeed for all people, that endeared him to the Indians.

Suddenly Hugh McGary, who was commanding the militia from Lincoln County, appeared, and Moluntha extended his hand in greeting. “
Was you in the Battle of Blue Licks?
” McGary asked. His rash and deadly behavior at the Blue Licks hung over McGary as a shame he could not erase.
Moluntha’s English was not very good
, and he had not been at the Battle of the Blue Licks, but he nodded, probably just being friendly, having no idea what McGary had asked. “Then God damn you,” McGary yelled, and took his hatchet from his belt. “I will show you Blue Licks play,” McGary added, and with a mighty swing split the old chief’s head like a ripe gourd. The women and children ran screaming, thinking another massacre was beginning. McGary then turned to attack Nonhelema and injured her hand or arm before he was restrained. Some Kentuckians, including Simon Kenton, later said they considered killing McGary on the spot. As it turned out McGary was court-martialed for killing Moluntha and stripped of his commission for a year. But he suffered no other punishment.

Later the same day the “squaw hacker” Thomas Kennedy attacked and scalped an Indian sitting peacefully in his tent. According to some accounts he set fire to the tent and burned the Indian alive. Kennedy was rebuked but not punished. Boone’s disgust with his fellow Kentuckians had been growing for some time, and this raid may well have
caused him to vow to be a protector of Indians, never a killer, ever again. As far as we know it was a vow he kept.

In all the sad history of the Indian conflicts along the frontier, there is example after example of the kind of atrocities McGary and Kennedy perpetrated. Leaders on both sides might try to restrain their men, honor treaties, protect women, but individuals such as Big Jim and Hugh McGary made their own rules and enacted their murderous passions, dragging all the rest into the inferno of paranoia and hate. Men who were there, and some who were not, said later that McGary should have been shot when he defied the colonels and yelled all were cowards who did not follow him across the Licking River August 19, 1782. Such a timely shot might have saved hundreds of lives and smoothed the history of the frontier as the settlements grew toward statehood. And McGary deserved to be shot again when he murdered Moluntha and fueled another round of conflict with the Shawnees.

After the attack in 1786 the Shawnees moved their towns still farther north, to the head of the Miami River.
Later they would move again
and settle on the Maumee and Auglaize rivers.

O
NE OF THE
businesses Boone had added to his many other enterprises at Limestone was the housing of prisoners taken in the Indian battles. Because he had lived with the Shawnees, Boone was often asked to negotiate the exchange of prisoners. He built a kind of jail and charged the state of Virginia in several bills that have been preserved. In fact “Daniel Boone’s Indan Book,” the ledger in which he kept these accounts, still exists. Apparently he liked his prisoners to be happy, for one of the first entries made after he returned from the raid with Logan reads, “
State of Virginia Dr. 19 galons of whiskey
Delivered to indins priserer on there first arrivel at Limestone, _3/0/0/.” Happy prisoners were safe prisoners, and safe prisoners were good business.

But by 1786 some of Boone’s business ventures were beginning to get out of control, especially the land and surveying businesses. As early as 1785 he had been involved in the complicated lawsuit of
Boofman v. Hickman
. This dispute had its origins in Boone’s 1774 journey into Kentucky with Michael Stoner to warn the surveyors of the coming Indian attacks. On that trip Boone had taken on the assignment of locating a four-thousand-acre parcel of land for James Hickman on a stream that became known as Hickman Creek. When Boone returned to Kentucky the next year to build Boonesborough, he had been warned by another surveyor, James Douglas, that the land he had marked for Hickman had already been claimed. “
He told me he had surveyed the same land
in 1774 and that I had better move the entry,” Boone deposed in 1794. To avoid trouble, Boone had two tracts of two thousand acres each surveyed on Boone’s Creek for Hickman, to replace the original claim. This time the surveying was done by John Floyd. A few months later Floyd told Boone that the land he had surveyed for Hickman was overlapped with an earlier survey done for a client named Jacob Boofman. Floyd offered to survey another parcel for Hickman, but Boone refused, since Hickman had already lost one surveyed parcel. Jacob Boofman was a chainman on Floyd’s surveying crew. Because of intervening conflicts with the Indians the issue was left hanging for a while. Floyd returned to Virginia for a visit and Boone assumed Hickman retained the title to the two tracts that had been designated for him in 1775.

Three years later Hickman decided to come to Kentucky to claim his land and was told by Col. William Preston that he had title to only one of the two-thousand-acre properties. Surprised and angry, Hickman confronted Boone and Floyd at the Virginia land office in Harrodsburg in May 1780. Boone explained what had happened and Floyd and Hickman got into a heated argument. “
Hickman, Floyd and myself was face to face
where I rehearsed over the circumstances from first to last, and Hickman demanded a platt or field notes from Floyd.” Hickman demanded his second two thousand acres and Floyd refused. Floyd handed over his survey notes, but he was a close friend of Colonel Preston’s and assumed the district official would side with him in the dispute.

Thinking the issue settled, Boone asked Floyd that summer of 1780 to survey land for his son Israel on Boone’s Creek. Floyd told Boone that Hickman had never registered his claim on the west side of the creek; therefore, he was surveying that land for Boofman, and he would map out four hundred acres in addition for Israel Boone. Apparently Boone assumed Hickman had given up his attempt to claim that tract, and therefore some of it might as well go to Israel. But unknown to either Boone or Floyd, Hickman had pursued the matter over Floyd’s head with Preston and won title to the second two thousand acres on the west side of Boone’s Creek. Before he learned of Hickman’s official patent, Boone had entered claims for twelve other pieces of property on the creek and sold some of them off to raise money for still other purchases. One of the tracts he sold was within the boundaries Hickman had won title to.

For a long time Boone did not seem aware of the conflicting claims, but around 1783 he informed Floyd. On March 27, 1783, Floyd wrote to Preston, “
Boone built his station on part of the land
I surveyed for Boofman and is now aware of it. behold, it takes in his settlement [which] is the reason this is brought to his memory.” It is likely that this tangle of disputed claims added to the incentive to move, first to Marble Creek, then north to Limestone.

In 1785 Hickman came to Marble Creek or Limestone and showed Boone his deed to the land on Boone’s Creek. He accused Boone of conspiring with Floyd to cheat him. Boone argued that they had both been imposed on by Floyd. But Floyd had been killed in a fight with Indians in 1783 and could not help sort out the dispute. It was the kind of legal mess Boone hated most. Boone argued that everything he had done was done in good faith, and he offered to replace Hickman’s claim with double the number of acres on the Licking River, but Hickman refused. “
Said Boone also told deponent
that he had sold part of the defendant’s land while he thought it was his son’s right, but that he would give the defendant two acres for one on waters of Licking in lieu of what he had sold.” After all, Boone’s Creek was in the
preferred Bluegrass region. Boone finally agreed to restore Hickman’s land or give him equal acreage on Boone’s Creek.

Jacob Boofman, the chainman, was already dead also, but he had taken possession of the property Floyd had surveyed for him, and his family had inherited the land. Hickman had to sue them, and the case dragged on for years before Hickman finally won. In 1794 when his title was established, Boone gave Hickman almost a square mile of land on Boone’s Creek for ten pounds. Twenty years after the first survey, he was trying to do the right thing for his former client. But as in so many other cases, he was giving away what most businessmen would have fought for or sold for a profit. As the scholar Stephen Aron has said, “
Boone was ill-equipped for the cut-throat
practices of notable speculators. He was out of place in the courthouses and legislative halls where successful engrossers won their most important victories.”

“
Little by little his wealth melted away
,” his son Nathan later said. Some of the setbacks Boone suffered in the 1780s were simply the result of bad luck. For example, some of the documents for Boone’s land deals, purchases, surveys, maps, titles, were in the hands of Col. John Floyd. When Floyd was killed by Indians in 1783 some of these papers were lost, along with Floyd’s corroborating testimony, and Boone was deprived of evidence for claims where boundaries were disputed or titles contested. When it came to business, Boone seemed to have more than his share of bad breaks. From the loss of more than twenty thousand dollars at the inn in James City County, Virginia, in 1780, to the partial loss of a huge shipment of ginseng in a boating accident in 1788, to the loss of ten thousand acres in Fayette County to the swindler Gilbert Imlay, he encountered misfortunes with his investments and enterprises on a grand scale.

Among his multiple ventures in the 1780s was lending money to friends and acquaintances. At his warehouse in Limestone he ran a kind of frontier bank, where trappers and hunters could deposit furs and hides, ginseng and other products of the forest, as well as tobacco, and draw on their account from Boone’s store. Friends would borrow
money and simply forget to pay it back. A passage in his account book for 1784 reads:

Aprl 14 lent money to several persons

Nov. 12 lent Wm Hays & Jim Jones money

Dec. 20 lent James Harrod & Danville 3-0-6d

Dec. 20 lent Owen Owens & Daniel -12-shillings

According to Nathan, Boone stood security for a five-hundred-pound debt for a man named Ebenezer Plat in February 1786 and sold him a horse, saddle, bridle, and male slave on credit, and Ebenezer Plat was never seen again. It was Boone who ended up paying off the five-hundred-pound note. “
Captain Plat was in New Orleans
, so my father never got his property or its worth again, and this was the only Negro boy my father then possessed.” Even worse was the case of Gilbert Imlay, an elegant and charming crook who had served as an officer in the Revolution in New Jersey. On August 15, 1785, Boone gave ten thousand acres between Hinkston Creek and the Licking River to Imlay on a promise to pay in installments, without even a down payment. Imlay never paid Boone a cent, sold the huge tract to somebody else, pocketed the money, and vanished from Kentucky. Imlay wrote to Boone from Virginia in 1786, apologizing for never paying for the purchase and suggesting Boone sell the tract to someone else. But Imlay had already sold the land to the notorious soldier and double agent James Wilkinson. Wilkinson was an officer in the American army but also an agent of the Spanish government, a slanderer of his betters such as Anthony Wayne, and a crook. He promoted the tract of land swindled from Boone as a property “
located and surveyed by Col. Daniel Boone
.”

Creditors and victims of Imlay’s intrigues from all over the country pursued him with warrants and duns and denunciations in newspapers, but he had already escaped to England. Imlay’s talents proved as useful in the literary world as they had in America. In London he published
A Topographical Description of the Territory of North America
and
included a version of Filson’s narrative of Boone’s life. Imlay formed a connection with the renowned feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Shelley’s future wife, the author of
Frankenstein
. Imlay fathered her first child, Fannie, and ended up cheating her also. It was Imlay, through his connections with Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who made Boone known to the English Romantics.