Blood and Treasure, page 28
The Indian who had borne the tomahawk pipe swung it at Boone. He ducked, and the blade glanced off the space between his shoulder blades, opening a shallow, two-inch gash on the back of his neck. When the assailant regrouped and lunged again, he caught William Bailey Smith with a similar superficial blow.
The field before the fort was now a haze of stinking sulfurous smoke, and in that moment of chaos each Kentuckian raced toward the stockade’s open front gate. Squire Boone trailed the pack. Running a crooked course much as his brother had used to pass through Blackfish’s gauntlet, he nonetheless took a ball to his right shoulder, which ricocheted along his back before lodging in his left shoulder. By the time he reached the gate it was closed, but he dived through a sally port left unlocked for just such a contingency.
The heights along the far side of the river overlooking the little fort burst with a cacophony of trilling war shrieks interspersed with rifle fire. In the flats surrounding the stockade, wisps of gun smoke rose from behind every tree stump, bush, and fallen log. The cornfields rippled with movement as hostiles carved paths through the tall stalks. Inside the stockade the cacophony of screams, gunfire, and baying dogs spooked the horses and cattle, which stampeded about the yard. The dust they raised made it nearly impossible to see. Boone had also prepared for this, preassigning defensive positions to each of his riflemen.
He and his fellow “negotiators” grabbed the guns stacked in the center of the courtyard and bolted to their posts. Some joined compatriots at the loopholes; others climbed to the parapets and bastions. Boone ran among them shouting encouragement. When he reached his brother in the southwest corner of the fort, he found Squire struggling to reload his rifle: he could barely lift his ramrod. Boone examined the wound to his shoulder—one of nine Squire Boone would receive over years of Indian fighting—and located the lead ball embedded in his scapula. He dug it out, but the pain remained nearly unbearable. Boone helped his brother back to his cabin, where Squire insisted that Boone leave a hand ax at his bedside in case the Indians scaled the walls.
For the next thirty-six hours the assailants, well supplied by the British, kept up a steady fire. As the livestock fell victim to musket balls and dropped, men and women rushed from the cabins with butcher knives to salvage what meat they could. Many of the women and children huddled in Richard Callaway’s cabin in the center of the yard. There Betsy Callaway discovered a German settler hiding under a bed. When she prodded him with a broom, he protested, “I was not made for a fighter; I was made for a potter.” She summoned Boone, who leveled his rifle and set the potter to work deepening the stockade’s new well. Instead, the man crawled into the hole in the ground and curled into a ball.
At one point during the fight’s opening act several dozen hostiles attempted to rush the stockade to pound down its gate. They were beaten back easily. Later, under cover of darkness, the Indians seized a supply of combustible flax the settlers had stockpiled outside the walls and festooned it across the length of a plank fence that ran the sixty yards from the Kentucky River to the northwest corner of the fort. They lit the dry fiber, but as the flames snaked toward the compound, a sole defender burst from a sally port and, facing scores of muzzle flashes that turned the sky livid with blinding neurons of white-orange fire, yanked down the end of the fencing. The flames fizzled like a fuse connected to nothing.
Throughout the fray, Pompey’s booming baritone could be heard either exhorting the pioneers to surrender before they were all wiped out or mocking them with obscenities for their terrible aim. The defenders hollered back, daring the black man to step into the open to see precisely how off the mark they might be. A booming laugh was the only response. Other Indians were also joyously blackguarding the defenders, but Pompey’s brash affronts particularly rankled. Given the racial attitudes of the era, how dare a black man who should by all rights be a slave so casually toss filthy curses at white men?
* * *
By Friday, September 11, the gunfight had settled into a desultory siege. None of the Boonesborough occupants had been killed as yet, and fewer than a half dozen had been wounded. These included Boone’s daughter Jemima, whose backside was grazed by a nearly spent ball as she ran ammunition to her father. The Kentucky River was at low current, and that afternoon a rifleman stationed on a parapet reported that its waters appeared unusually muddy. There was also an odd series of cracking sounds emanating from below the steep southern bank, and one end of a hewn cedar tree could be viewed working itself back and forth above the embankment, as if walking sentry.
Boone guessed that the Indians were attempting to tunnel beneath the stockade from the riverbank, likely at the direction of either the British officers or Canadian sappers. Whether their goal was to insert a large petard, or gunpowder bomb, to blow the stockade’s walls or to use the underground passageway to burst into the fort, he did not know. But he recognized the swaying cedar tree as a digging lever operated by several men, and the cracking noises as the snapping of large tree roots.
That night, with the heaviest fire of the siege commencing at dusk, he assigned a half dozen men to begin shoveling a trench, two to three feet wide by ten feet deep, from the northwest corner of the stockade parallel to the walls. Should the enemy tunnel reach that far, there would be a surprise awaiting them. In the meanwhile, each boulder the diggers uncovered was promptly rolled down the slope to the riverbank.*
On Saturday morning, concentrated Indian rifle fire finally snapped the wooden, fifty-foot flagstaff that rose from the center of the Boonesborough compound. When the American colors fell, the Indians trilled in ecstasy, with Pompey’s bellows perhaps the most audible. Not long after, the unmistakable visage of the black warrior was spotted on several occasions popping up over the riverbank not far from the mouth of the tunnel, apparently to survey what further damage the fort had suffered and, of course, to challenge the frontiersmen’s manhood. Several balls fired toward the peeping and dodging translator failed to find their mark. Finally, an imperturbable long hunter named William Collins nestled in behind a gun loop, shouldered his rifle, and waited. The next time Pompey showed his face, Collins blew it into the Kentucky River.
34
“WIDDER MAKER”
After six days of fighting the tide began to turn incrementally in favor of the Boonesborough defenders. The previous night a brief but raging rain squall had so soaked the earth that the Indian tunnel collapsed. And though the Kentuckians were unaware of that development, they sensed that the enemy was beginning to flag under the lethal sting of the fort’s marksmen. Examples were myriad.
Some one hundred yards above the stockade near the riverbank, for instance, two Indians had found cover behind a large fallen sycamore tree. Employing a patience unusual in the heat of a firefight, they had taken fine and special aim at the loopholes cut into the compound’s walls, some of which not in use had been stopped up with rocks. They had done damage, killing the defender David Bundrin with a direct shot into a blocked loophole that exploded the rock into Bundrin’s forehead, and injuring a second when a near-miss sent shards of wood shrapnel into the rifleman’s face.* Moreover, their ingenuity was equal to their skills with a weapon. One had carried with him a lifelike wooden mask, and when he thrust it above the log to draw fire, the other would shoot from the far end of the downed tree. This continued for some while—the attackers, decoy and shooter, shifting positions on each pull of the trigger—until someone behind the palisades caught on to the ruse. The next time the “false face” was thrust aloft, one settler dutifully fired at it while another waited the split second for the second Indian to appear. When he did, he shot him dead.
Not long after, a warrior firing from behind a tree stump in the flats inadvertently exposed his knee. A rifleman promptly exploded it with a ball. When the wounded brave attempted to crawl off, a gutshot stopped him where he lay. And when an Indian, thinking he was out of rifle range, was observed seated carelessly on a fence beside the staff that held the waving Union Jack, three long hunters overloaded their large-bore muskets with heavy charges, calculated a rough azimuth, and fired simultaneously. The unlucky fighter was blasted backward off the fence and moved no more.
Similarly, a Shawnee—recognizable from his bear-greased topknot—climbed to the fork of a tree atop the ridgeline on the opposite side of the Kentucky River 260 yards from the fort. He proceeded to repeatedly arc musket balls over the walls. Given the distance and the dwindling gunpowder stores forcing the Indians to undercharge their muskets, his shots were more nuisance than mortal threat. What most riled the defenders, however, was the warrior’s habit of firing off a round and then turning and lifting his breechclout to waggle and pat his bare ass at the pioneers. Boone was summoned.
After surveying the situation from the fort’s rear parapet, Boone sent for a rifle of a slightly larger caliber than his own “widder maker.” He packed it with an extra charge of black powder, and loaded it with a one-ounce, .66-caliber ball, a bit heavier than usual. His shot was sublime and sent the Indian tumbling from his perch.
A moment later, as Boone scampered across the stockade’s open grounds, he was hit by a ball. Jemima helped him to his cabin, where, as she tended his wound, he could hear the chants from beyond the walls. “We killed Boone. We killed Boone.” As soon as his daughter had finished her bandaging he climbed back to the parapets. “I’m here ready for you yellow rascals,” he shouted.
Squire Boone, dragging himself from his sickbed, also taught the besiegers that it was unwise to gather in packs. When a large party of warriors were spotted conferring near the felled peach trees, the younger Boone unveiled the homemade wooden cannon he had earlier constructed from the hollow trunk of a black gum tree. He angled the contraption’s steel-banded wooden barrel for an arcing shot and loaded it with scores of spent balls retrieved from the compound’s grounds. The cannon’s barrel cracked into pieces when fired, but its only shot blew several Indians into the timber screen.
Having experienced the futility of their bold charges against the fort’s sturdy walls, the attackers at length resorted to long-range attempts to burn out the Kentuckians. Flaming arrows, some with small pouches of gunpowder attached to the shafts, fell on Boonesborough like orange rain. The brittle shingles that roofed the compound’s cabins were particularly vulnerable to spreading sparks, but Squire Boone had also anticipated this. Before the Indians had even arrived, he had unbreeched several old muskets from their locks and fitted them with hand-pumped pistons that, when attached to a water bucket, could splash out close to a quart of liquid with each “shot.” Moreover, the cabin roofs had purposely been constructed to slope inward from the stockade walls on an oblique angle, with the rows of shingles held in place by a single large pin at their apex. A rawhide tug was tied to the pin, and if the water guns could not douse a shingle fire, a woman inside a cabin would yank the tug, the pin would disengage, and the burning mass would fall harmlessly onto the dirt.
The settlers also faced a more insidious type of incendiary device when the Indians wrapped tufts of flax around thick strips of flammable hickory bark several feet in length and coated the contrivance with moistened gunpowder. These makeshift hand grenades were then affixed to a stick, which served as a throwing handle. They would light the flax fiber and, darting from behind the cover of trees or up from below the riverbank, lob the firebombs over the walls in hopes of sparking a flame. Most fell harmlessly onto the fort’s grounds; the rest were easily extinguished.
Finally, on the night of September 17, scores of warriors made a final rush toward the stockade wielding these fiery faggots. The deafening series of discharges that cut them down made the Kentuckians’ gun barrels so hot that their dampened wiping patches sizzled in the rifle bores. Though most of the attackers lay dead or dying before they could reach the walls, enough made it through that several cabins burst into flames. Water-bucket brigades were finally able to douse the fires, but not before a long hunter returning to Boonesborough and watching the conflagration from a distant knoll hied off to Logan’s Station to report the fort fallen. He was mistaken.
The next morning, after eight days of fighting, birdsong was the only sound emanating from the heights and fields surrounding Boonesborough. The Indians were gone.
* * *
During the siege, the Boonesborough garrison suffered two men dead with another half dozen wounded, including Boone, his brother, and his daughter. When Boone led a squad of riflemen through the front gate to inspect the battleground, the only corpse they found was Pompey’s. Superstition forbade an Indian from touching a dead black man, or “bearskin,” and the big-voiced translator’s remains had been left where he had fallen, splayed near the collapsed tunnel shaft. When Boone examined its mouth he found a plethora of ten-foot poles wrapped with scaly hickory bark held in place by tugs of dry flax. The Indian objective, he then understood, was to tunnel up to the walls of the stockade, pop up from the underground passageway, and jam the mega-torches between the logs of the fort’s walls. He thought it might have worked, particularly if some sort of gunpowder mines had been employed in tandem.
Following blood trails large and small—and discovering the bullet-riddled wooden mask behind the fallen sycamore—Boone estimated that between thirty-five and forty of the enemy had been killed, with untold wounded. Most of the dead had likely been collected, weighted with rocks, and slipped into the Kentucky River. A fat flock of vultures circling the stony outcroppings on the far side of the river indicated that the rest may have been buried in the deep crevasses that laced the jagged ridges. The British and Canadians, he knew, would have carried off their slain, either back to Detroit or to be buried on the trail north.
Trudging back to the fort, the Kentuckians were astonished by the sheer firepower the enemy had let loose. At least 125 pounds of lead balls were retrieved, most from the ground beneath the gun loopholes. Boone also estimated that another 100 pounds of lead were embedded in the facade of the stockade facing the river.
Two days later Simon Kenton and his partner returned to Boonesborough atop stolen Shawnee ponies; not far behind them was a detachment of one hundred or so mounted Virginia militia volunteers finally answering Boone’s and Callaway’s pleas for help. At Boone’s suggestion the Virginians rode for Logan’s Station to ensure that no war parties circled back to attack the smaller blockhouse.
Across the ensuing days, scattered reports from Harrodsburg and Logan’s Station brought news of small Indian raiding parties, likely Cherokee traveling to their homelands in the South, stealing cattle and sniping at lone settlers and hunters along the way. But for now, the pivotal moment for both Kentucky and, in a sense, the American Revolution, had passed.
Had Blackfish’s host managed to destroy Boonesborough, there was little doubt they would have similarly overrun Harrodsburg and Logan’s Station. Emboldened by the fall of the rebellion’s western outposts, Henry Hamilton would have faced little opposition to raising a combined Redcoat–Native American army to flank the coastal revolutionaries from the rear, forcing Washington’s Continental Army to defend two fronts. Gen. Cornwallis was already planning to open a southern theater, and it is easy to imagine Cornwallis and Hamilton crushing the southern rebels between them. Moreover, how far the psychological blow would have reverberated had the fabled Daniel Boone been killed or captured at Boonesborough is unknowable.
As it was, the threat was now over for the settlers of Kentucky and, perhaps, for the United States. Not so for Boone.
* * *
Despite Boone’s cool leadership during the siege of Boonesborough, Col. Richard Callaway still had a grudging score to settle. Not only had Callaway continue to seethe at what he considered Boone’s impertinence during the rescue of his kidnapped daughters, he blamed Boone for the captivity of two of his nephews, Micajah and James, who had been taken at the salt camp and were still held by the Shawnee. From Callaway’s point of view, who knew what fiendish treatment the sullen and defeated Blackfish had in store for them upon his return to the Ohio Country?
With the tacit complicity of Benjamin Logan—who was also put off by the glory accruing to Boone—Callaway used his elected councilman’s position to bring court-martial charges against the frontiersman. He accused Boone of four treasonous acts—voluntarily surrendering the salt-boilers to the Indians; plotting with Blackfish in New Chillicothe and with Hamilton in Detroit to effect the surrender of Boonesborough; abandoning the fort in the face of an imminent enemy assault to lead the raid on the Paint Creek village; and endangering the lives of the men who accompanied him to the ersatz peace parley outside the stockade.
The trial was convened within days at Logan’s Station, with a panel of Kentucky militia officers serving as judges and jury. The court called four witnesses—Richard Callaway, the escaped captives William Hancock and Andy Johnson, and finally Boone. In his testimony Callaway mostly fumed and sputtered, while Johnson and Hancock admitted that the members of the salt-boiling party had indeed been given the opportunity to debate their fate on the Licking River and had freely surrendered under advice but not pressure from Boone. Though Johnson’s antipathy toward Boone’s friendliness with the Indians remained strong, Hancock conceded that Boone was probably correct in that Boonesborough would likely have fallen to Blackfish back in February if Boone and the war chief had not struck their deal.
