Blood and Treasure, page 20
Also arriving at the Kentucky settlements that fall were George Rogers Clark and the frontiersman Simon Kenton. Clark’s reputation preceded him, primarily because of his fearless if absurd plan of a year earlier to attack the Shawnee stronghold on the Scioto River with a mere ninety men. And the twenty-year-old Kenton’s physical presence—at six feet four he was a giant for the era—matched his reputation as a seasoned hunter, scout, and Indian fighter. Despite their youth—Clark had yet to turn twenty-three—both men had already grown a lot of hard bark, and both would go on to achieve mythic martial renown, although in somewhat different fashions. The rawboned Kenton was destined to save Daniel Boone’s life during an Indian fight before being nearly tortured to death as a Shawnee captive. And Clark’s military expertise would in the near future be tapped by Patrick Henry. Henry, on the verge of becoming the governor of the newly declared state of Virginia, wanted Clark to lead an expedition against the western tribes. For now, however, both remained lone pioneers attempting to scratch out a living in an untamed territory of forest and meadow.
By the close of 1775 the Transylvania Company’s land office at Boonesborough had registered more than nine hundred applicants for plots totaling some 560,000 acres. In truth, however, the Christmas celebrations up and down the Kentucky River that season were muted. Most of the new claimants, citing the uncertain Indian question, had yet to make their payments, much less physically move west. The few who did venture over the mountains were for the most part speculators who would rush into the territory, throw up a few “pigsty cabins”—roofless and doorless lean-tos surrounded by a few rows of planted corn—and scuttle back east to sell the properties at a profit.
If on its books the colony appeared to be thriving, it is doubtful that the combined settlements along the Kentucky River contained much more than the few hundred people who had trickled into the territory since the Transylvania Purchase. With the War for Independence threatening to spill over the Appalachians, the future of the colony was decidedly opaque. As Henderson’s chief surveyor noted in a letter to a colleague, “I think there will be but small improvements made this year, as many [potential settlers] seem confused, and great numbers are leaving the country.”
* * *
What Daniel Boone made of the Transylvania Company’s attempts to bullyrag a brand-new colony into the national fabric of the nascent United States is murky. Historians have primarily been left to rely on Richard Henderson’s self-serving journals and correspondence as the most comprehensive written accounts from the period. Though he slowly grew more sympathetic to the cause of American independence, Boone, like Henderson, was far from a rabid secessionist. There is even sketchy evidence that he received a few British visitors with gracious aplomb when they arrived to feel out his Kentucky hamlet’s political leanings. There is also no doubt that he never forgot Henderson’s generous land grant. In the end, however, Boone’s thoughts about the company’s efforts were moot.
Within a year the Transylvania Company would be bankrupt, with Virginia royalists annexing the consortium’s holdings in the name of the Crown. Gov. Dunmore, perhaps fearful of a surge in seditious activity among Henderson’s backers should he be prosecuted, compensated the judge and his associates by awarding him two hundred thousand acres in the far west of the territory beyond the Falls of the Ohio. Years later the state of North Carolina would similarly nullify the company’s claims to the sliver of northern Tennessee along the Cumberland River that had been wrested from the Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals. With that, Henderson returned to North Carolina to run for his old superior-court seat. He won.
In the end, the Transylvania Company’s foray into the western frontier occurred at the wrong place and particularly the wrong time for the land speculators. Not the least of their miscalculations was that the carbonated forces driving the American Revolution would allow business barons with even a taint of Tory ties to purchase large swaths of the country they were fighting to free from British rule. As Thomas Jefferson observed, the rents that the company charged were in and of themselves “a mark of vassalage.”
As for Boone, the demise of the Transylvania Company also marked the end of his short stint as a gentleman farmer. Within a year his two-thousand-acre grant was invalidated by Virginia’s appropriation of the territory. Without complaint, he moved his family into a cabin that in time would become part of Boonesborough’s fort complex.
* * *
Despite heartening reports from beyond the Appalachians—Washington driving the British from Boston, American troops repelling an assault on Charleston Harbor by the Royal Navy—the Cherokee renegade Dragging Canoe had proven a prophet. Along with the tidings of revolutionary triumphs came news that Dragging Canoe had convinced his followers to take to the warpath. Raiding parties incited by British agents were ravishing homesteads from north Georgia to western Virginia, including up and down the Watauga and Holston River Valleys. Over three hundred warriors had boldly attacked three American stockades simultaneously, including Joseph Martin’s rebuilt fort in Virginia’s Powell Valley as well as a blockhouse situated on an island in Tennessee’s Holston River. The attacks only ebbed when Dragging Canoe was wounded in both legs during the latter fight.
In neighboring Kentucky, the scent of war was also in the air as news spread of Shawnee and Mingo probes into the territory. As such, the presence of settlers and landjobbers noticeably thinned, and even the boldest long hunters kept nearer to the stockaded stations and slept with their rifles loaded. Like the Cherokee, the tribes north of the Ohio River strongly suspected that America’s War for Independence was being fought over Indian land despite high-minded slogans about taxation without representation. It was the Shawnee who recognized the earliest that this internecine conflict among the whites could only end badly for the tribe should the rapacious colonists prevail. Native American support of the Crown, in essence, was the lesser of two evils. It was not the British, after all, who had begun desecrating Kanta-ke with cabins and cornfields.
Given the patterns of history repeating itself—in this case, of white empires arming Indians to do their forest fighting—Boone surely suspected that his lonely outpost in the far-off Bluegrass Country was destined to become the western focal point of the war being waged on the other side of the mountains. For as the spring of 1776 bloomed and Indian activity proliferated along the Kentucky River, a pall hung like an illness over Kentucky’s pioneer settlements.
Within this tense atmosphere, whenever an incident occurred—a stray surveyor’s mangled body discovered, a family burned out of their isolated cabin, a hunter unaccounted for—it was always to Boone, equally adept at stalking hoofs or paws, feet or feathers, whom even the most experienced backwoods hands looked for guidance. “Old Daniel’s on the track” became a familiar refrain around campfires along the river. Boone’s innate ability to wisp through the forest in order to separate viable threats from mere rumor lent him an unmatched mystique. That skill would soon be put to the test.
25
KIDNAPPED
This time Daniel Boone heard the piercing shrieks and recognized them as only a parent could. He grabbed his rifle, burst from his cabin, and sprinted toward the Kentucky River without pausing to put on his moccasins. When he reached the south bank, the only clues were the two broken oars and the strip of torn calico belonging to his daughter’s Sabbath-day dress. He was too late to see the Indians carry off the thirteen-year-old Jemima and the two Callaway girls. But he knew what he had to do to get them back.
Boone, like every man, woman, and child living along the frontier in eighteenth-century America, was accustomed to the quotidian barbarity of life on the borderlands. Scalpings, mutilations, murdered infants—these were no less the trade-offs for whites and Indians alike than a random wolf attack or bear mauling. At least a kidnapping offered the possibility of retrieving the abducted. Only weeks earlier the twin sons of Pennsylvania immigrants had been taken by Mingoes just a few hundred yards from their cabin near Harrodsburg. The Shawnee chief Cornstalk had intervened, and the boys were turned over to an Indian agent at Fort Pitt relatively unharmed. This time, Boone did not intend to let it get that far.
* * *
Sunday, July 14, 1776, had dawned hot and dry as chalk, but the morning’s heavy dew rendered the early hours bearable. Jemima Boone had spent most of the previous afternoon tending the family garden before cutting her instep on a broken cane stalk. Now, returning from religious services and still wearing her Sunday dress and bonnet, she invited her friends Betsy Callaway, fifteen, and Fanny Callaway, thirteen, to accompany her to the river, where she could dip her wound into the cool waters.
On the south bank of the watercourse they untethered one of the settlement’s dugout canoes and clambered aboard. Neither Callaway girl voiced any concern; Jemima Boone was so at home on the water that her nickname was “Duck.” There was a tiny islet less than a half mile downstream, where wild onions grew, and Jemima hoped to grub some up to make a poultice for her injury while the sisters gathered wild fruits. They pushed off with Betsy and Fanny manning the oars and Jemima handling the tiller while dragging her foot through the water.
At the time ten small American communities, or “stations,” had risen on or near the banks of the Kentucky River. These consisted of anywhere from a dozen to forty or so cabins, a pointillist belt bookended by the two largest stockade communities—Boonesborough to the east and Harrodsburg to the west. Every child living along the river had been taught that the land to the north was hostile territory and to keep away. But the three girls had drifted less than one hundred yards when the current began to draw their canoe toward the north bank.
The Callaway sisters struggled furiously with their paddles to break from the water flow’s pull, but they were not strong enough. The slender canoe was a few feet from shore when five Indians—three Shawnee and two Cherokee—rose from a canebrake. One of them waded into the shallows, grabbed the buffalo-tug rope attached to the bow, and began reeling in the little craft. As Jemima’s screams echoed through Boonesborough, Betsy and Fanny Callaway beat the Indian about the head and shoulders with their oars until the paddles broke.
Once ashore, the Indians marched the girls north as the three did all they could to slow their progress. Their screaming had stopped: one of the Cherokees who spoke passing English threatened to scalp Betsy Callaway on the spot if it continued. But Jemima found so many opportunities to collapse and complain about the wound to her bare foot that one Indian tossed her a pair of moccasins and brandished his tomahawk until she pulled them on, stood, and shuffled on.
When the captives pretended to struggle through the thick, thorny underbrush catching on their clothes, the Indians sliced off their dresses and petticoats at the knees. One noticed Betsy Callaway digging the heavy heels of her Sunday shoes into the soft forest undergrowth of clover and peavine. He lopped off the heels, and thereafter the group kept to the harder ground along ridgelines. While climbing the ridges the girls feigned using the branches of saplings and tall bushes for purchase while making sure to break off as many as they could. And when no one was looking, Betsy Callaway managed to tear bits from her white linen handkerchief and surreptitiously toss them to the side of their path.
It was coming on twilight, and Jemima guessed that they had traveled six miles when they stopped to rest. Fingering the pocketknife hidden in the folds of her dress, she told the English-speaking Cherokee, a minor war leader known to the Americans as Hanging Maw, that she recalled once seeing him outside her family’s cabin back on the Clinch. He had been talking to her father, Daniel Boone. At the name, Hanging Maw’s lips curled into a speculative half smile. He asked if the others were her sisters. Sensing things would fare better for Betsy and Fanny if she lied, Jemima nodded yes.
The Cherokee snorted a laugh. “Then we have done pretty well for old Boone this time,” he said.
* * *
By now more than a dozen armed men had joined Boone racing down the south bank of the river in pursuit of the empty canoe. These included a mounted troop led by Betsy and Fanny’s father, Richard Callaway. Callaway was naturally anxious to ride after his daughters, and after a twelve-year-old boy plunged into the fast-flowing water and retrieved the craft, Callaway paused only long enough to inspect it for bloodstains. Finding none, he led his troop to a ford a mile or so downstream while Boone and five others swam the deep watercourse. These latter included the surveyor John Floyd whom Boone and Michael Stoner had set out to warn against Indian attack two years earlier and Betsy Callaway’s fiancé, Samuel Henderson, the thirty-year-old nephew of the Transylvania Company’s Richard Henderson.
By the time Boone and his companions picked up the Indians’ trail running up the steep bluff on the north side of the river, Callaway’s party was galloping hard toward them. There were perhaps ninety minutes of daylight remaining. Boone, still barefoot, his Sunday pantaloons dripping, cautioned Callaway that at the first hint of hoofbeats the Indians would surely kill the girls. Given the raiders’ route, he suspected that they would keep to a northerly course and cross the Licking River near the spreading salt spring known as the Blue Licks. He ordered Callaway to lead his horsemen on a wide berth to the Licking and form a loose circle out ahead of the kidnappers. Boone and his party would pursue on foot and drive the Indians into Callaway’s net.
Callaway bristled, visibly riled. He was used to giving orders, not receiving them. His resentment of Boone’s growing notoriety had only increased in the months since they’d reached Kentucky. He was also aware, as common gossip had it, that Boone was not even the father of the girl with his name who had gone missing. But he held his spleen, recognizing that this was neither the place nor time for prolonged argument. He nodded his assent. His revenge on Boone would wait.
Boone and his party silently disappeared into the forest afoot, at first following the deep imprints left by the heels of Betsy Callaway’s shoes and, later, the clumps of broken branches and snippets of handkerchief dropped as trail markers. They had made some five miles when it became too dark to continue. They camped that night with a company of nine Virginians they stumbled across erecting a cabin on staked land. Boone sent his best swimmer back to Boonesborough to retrieve extra powder and ball, his breechclout, and his moccasins. It is not recorded how well he slept that night.
* * *
The Indians slumbered in a loose circle around their captives. Each girl, kept out of reach from the others, was pinioned at the elbows with rawhide tugs, with the loose end of the makeshift ropes fastened to an Indian’s breechclout. Seated with their backs to a large hemlock, Jemima, Betsy, and Fanny spent the night straining to hear rescuers’ footfalls above the chirping of insects and the occasional hoot of an owl.
They broke camp at dawn on Monday, with the Indians proffering small hunks of unsalted, smoked buffalo tongue that made the girls retch. The captives continued their ruse of breaking off small branches, twigs, and vines to guide any pursuers, but by this time the Indians had grown wise and positioned one of their party as a trailer to clean up any sign. Sometime around noon one of the Shawnees ran down an aging white nag that had likely strayed too far from a hunting camp. Thinking it would quicken their pace, they placed first Jemima and then Fanny and sometimes all three on the horse’s back. Though the girls were expert horsewomen, they feigned fright, and by surreptitiously pinching and jabbing their heels into the poor beast’s underbelly they managed to turn it into a bucking bronco from which they were repeatedly thrown. Vexed, the Indians abandoned the horse and doubled their wariness.
The girls were quick to notice that any time they came across a stream running north, the Indians would plunge into the middle and follow it for some distance. If it was too deep for their captives, they would throw them over their shoulders. Similarly, the abductors went out of their way to split up and snake through the thickest canebrakes in their path, often doubling back to break separate courses through the same obstruction. It may have slowed their escape, but if Daniel Boone was indeed dogging them, they would not make it easy for him.
The Indians prodded the girls along at a hard pace, and after traveling close to thirty miles with only intermittent breaks, the party stopped at dusk to camp on a fork of two tributaries flowing into the Licking. Here the suddenly talkative Hanging Maw told Jemima that they were heading for the Shawnee towns on the Scioto, still one hundred miles away. He boasted that he had been among a war party of Cherokees scouting an ambush around Boonesborough for a week or so when he and his companion fell in with the three Shawnee just as they spotted the girls in the canoe. That night they again tied their captives with tugs in a sitting position, but this time allowed them to huddle together. Jemima and Fanny took turns laying down their heads and dozing on Betsy’s lap.
* * *
Three of the cabin builders had joined Boone’s pursuit, bringing his party to eight. By early on Monday morning they had tracked the Indians to their previous night’s encampment, but from there the trail went cold. More specifically, the several trails went cold. No longer were Betsy’s heel marks acting as a beacon, and the bent and broken shrubbery seemed to be more scattered, with no sign of the shredded handkerchief bits.
Boone deduced that the Indians were not only sporadically splitting up, but also deliberately laying false sign. All the paths, in any case, led in one general direction—almost due north toward the Licking and then into Shawnee country. Boone drew his little troop together and told them that instead of running in circles they would be better off plowing ahead toward the Ohio. On several occasions they recrossed the Indian trail almost by accident. Stifling the few mild protests to follow it, Boone kept his company together at a steady jog.
