The Taking of Jemima Boone, page 11
Blackfish’s warriors had already staged operations in the Kentucky settlements, Shawnee counterparts to Dragging Canoe’s Cherokee raiders. Boone saw signs of strategic coordination in Blackfish’s maneuvers. “The Indians had disposed their warriors in different parties at this time,” Boone recounted through his biographer, “and attacked the different garrisons to prevent their assisting each other.” So many incidents riddled the area that 1777 came to be known as the year of the bloody sevens. Only twenty-two men, along with family members, remained at Boonesboro. “We passed through a scene of sufferings that exceed description,” Boone recalled.
Only when militias entered the area did Boonesboro temporarily have support to carry out hunting expeditions to replenish the food supply for the residents. The arrival of a Virginia unit late in 1777 gave the fort a solid boost. As one of the militiamen put it, the newcomers “acted in the capacity of defenders of the fort against the enemy and also as Indian spies.” The fort’s leadership now felt sufficiently confident in their numbers to send a contingent to make salt at an area of the Licking River known as the Lower Blue Licks. Militia members had brought iron kettles for the purpose. Saltmaking was a time consuming, intensive process. A bushel of salt could require up to eight hundred gallons of spring water. Boone headed the expedition, composed of thirty men drawn from the militia and the residents of Boonesboro and the few remaining Kentucky outposts. Though Richard Callaway stayed behind at the fort, the Boonesboro contingent included three of his nephews, Flanders (Jemima’s husband) and his brothers Micajah and James Callaway. For at least a month, the fort would be left without its most proven leader, and Jemima would be separated from her father and husband.
SALTMAKERS WOULD COLLECT sediment-rich water from the spring in the kettles, which would then be brought to a fire to be boiled to produce salt. The wood fire would be assiduously maintained and fed frequently. Packers would then prepare the salt for transport, and couriers would run it to Boonesboro and the other forts. Guards patrolled the area for any signs of a problem, and scouts and hunters—Boone and son-in-law Flanders among them—would leave camp to look for signs of Indians and hunt for meat to bring back to the other saltmakers.
At the encampment, Boone woke up on Saturday, February 7, 1778, having had a distressing dream. He dreamed that his father was angry. Squire Boone, whose name was passed on to Daniel’s younger brother, had been a Quaker who had a knotty relationship with the religious authorities; when delivering discipline, Squire would beat his children until they asked for forgiveness, which Daniel, being Daniel, never would. Boone attached ominous significance to dreams that featured his angry father.
Eeriness continued beyond the dream. This was a cloudy, snowy day, a little more than a month into the tedious saltmaking expedition. After hunting on his own, Boone packed up hundreds of pounds of fresh buffalo meat on his horse, requiring him to lead the horse back toward camp rather than ride it. Man and horse navigated a narrow passage, slowing down from the heavy snowfall and a fallen tree blocking the way. After getting beyond the obstruction, Boone’s horse seemed scared. Boone, now on alert, peered through a haze of snow. Thirty steps away, he spotted four Indians hiding behind the fallen tree. He had seconds before they’d realize he had seen them—seconds to plot what to do. He considered pulling down the meat from his horse so he could mount it, but the tugs—green fasteners made from buffalo hide—had frozen and wouldn’t budge. He reached for his knife, but the blood on the blade had frozen it to the scabbard.
Boone launched into a run. Two of the Indians gave chase on either side, while one cut Boone’s load free and climbed onto the horse, riding after their quarry. There was no way to elude pursuers over the fresh snow—Boone’s prints, as son Nathan recalled, “could easily be followed.” He ran approximately a mile and a half. The Indians began to fire at him, bullets crashing into the snow and sending white powder flying into the air around him. One ball came so close to him that it cut the strap of his powder horn, which held gunpowder. Boone understood that shots that came so near without hitting him were intended to stop him, not kill him. With the Indians on his heels, Boone realized “it was impossible to escape.” He leaned his rifle against a tree and surrendered. As Boone summed it up in terse fashion through his biographer: “They pursued, and took me.”
The warriors seized Boone’s weapons and brought him three miles to an encampment eight miles below the Lower Blue Licks. Boone was ushered over to Pompey, a Black man, formerly enslaved, who was fluent in English and Shawnee. Pompey acted as interpreter. The sight that greeted Boone was overwhelming. By his estimate, a hundred Indians were gathered there, during a time in winter when settlers expected tribes to send out only small hunting parties. High-ranking Shawnee approached their captive. They reminded him of his history in Kentucky. Captain Will, who had confronted Boone on his first Kentucky expedition to warn him not to come back, was present.
“How d’ do, Captain Will?” Boone said.
Captain Will, taking a moment to remember his first encounter with Boone, repeated his warning that “the wasps and yellow jackets” would sting him if he tried to settle Kentucky. Arguably, his point was proved by Boone’s circumstances.
Looking around, Boone saw James and George Girty, brothers of Simon Girty and, like Simon, former Indian captives–turned–trusted members of the tribal communities. Also present was Nimwha (also known as Munseeka), Cornstalk’s brother, who succeeded Cornstalk as head chief, and may have been the same Shawnee who went to Fort Randolph to denounce the kidnapping of Jemima and the Callaway girls. Two French operatives working for the British, Charles Beaubien and Louis Lorimier, accompanied the Indian party. This pair had tried to engage the Miami tribe in a mission against Kentucky settlers before succeeding in recruiting this group of Shawnee, already energized by personal and strategic motives.
Pompey then escorted Boone over to Blackfish, the war chief, and in many ways Boone’s counterpart as frontier strategist. Blackfish, according to Boone family tradition, “was truly one of nature’s noblemen.” He was known to wear a cappo, a long, dark, hooded European cloak. It was Blackfish who’d led the ambush at Boonesboro the previous April, when Boone was wounded. It was Blackfish whose son died in the rescue of Jemima and the Callaways—by Boone’s own gun—and whose raiders had been terrifying Boonesboro since. With Cornstalk gone, no dissension within the tribe held him back from personal reparations or from trying to reclaim Kentucky for use of the tribes. Blackfish asked if the men at the Pememo Lick—what the settlers called Lower Blue Licks—had come with Boone.
“How do you know that there are any men there?” Boone asked.
They made clear to Boone that their scouts had seen them.
Boone admitted that the saltmakers had come with him. Blackfish replied bluntly: he was going to kill them.
Chapter
7
Families
BOONE HAD NO GOOD CHOICES. If he resisted Blackfish, the Indians could toss him aside and overwhelm the saltmaking camp at the Lower Blue Licks without warning. He needed to find a way to appease Blackfish while avoiding that bloodshed. Boone’s son Nathan recalled his father’s thinking. “The enemy [had] four times the number of the salt boilers, the latter, ignorant of their discovery, would find it impossible to escape; & the next day, when the Indians proposed going there, being Sunday, [Boone’s men] would be loitering about off their guard.” Even if some of the saltmakers managed to slip away from a surprise attack, the fresh snow, now rising to knee height, would lead Indians right to them, just as it had stymied Boone’s attempted escape. Boone made an extreme move. He proposed that he would surrender his men if the Indians agreed not to mistreat them or make them run the gauntlet—a potentially fatal military punishment.
With his conditions accepted, Boone was brought the next day by his captors to a hill opposite the salt spring, where the saltmakers rested. As Boone expected, they were literally caught lying down—sunning themselves in the snow. Boone appeared alongside an Indian and hailed them. Seeing the Indian, the saltmakers grabbed for their weapons “ready for battle,” as one of Boone’s men later recounted. In a moment that had to send a shock through them all, Boone cried out: “Don’t fire! If you do, all will be massacred.” He explained that Indians surrounded them and that he had negotiated surrender in return for good treatment. Boone warned that “it was impossible for them to get away” and “begged of them not to attempt to defend themselves.” The settlers yielded, though whether all agreed with how Boone “gave up” (as one captive bluntly put it) would be a matter for debate later. But for now there was no time. Indians emerged from every direction.
The captives were taken from their camp and gathered together, their weapons thrown into a pile. They were ordered to sit. The Indians assembled a council and weighed what they would do. That Boone’s deal already seemed to have been voided would have come as a grim surprise to him. From the Indians’ perspectives, justice had been constantly under assault by settlers. Cornstalk had been the restraining influence after Boone killed Blackfish’s son and in arguing that the death was justified to rescue the girls—but then Americans murdered Cornstalk in cold blood. No wonder Henry Hamilton had considerable success pushing tribal grievances against Americans into full-blown war.
The council of Indians decided to vote whether to hold to the bargain proposed by Boone or to execute the prisoners.
THAT EVENING, FLANDERS CALLAWAY, husband of Jemima and nephew of Boone’s rival Richard Callaway, returned to the Lower Blue Licks after having been away hunting with another member of the saltmaking party. They were in for a shock. The camp was empty. At first the hunters considered the possibility that Boone and the others had started back toward Boonesboro early. Then they found a bow with arrows, and salt tipped over into the snow. Realizing there could be no benign explanation, the two men abandoned the encampment. Reaching Boonesboro the next day, Flanders reported the mysterious development, which hit the settlement hard. A few men set out from the fort to search and picked up a trail through the snow, but they lost it at a river crossing. The missing men could be anywhere, assuming they were alive.
The night she had been rescued with the Callaway girls, Jemima Boone vowed not to let her father out of her sight again. A year and a half later, he had vanished into thin air, nothing more than footprints in the snow, and her husband had come within a hairbreadth of the same fate—in fact, two of Flanders’s brothers had disappeared, too.
They all knew Daniel Boone had been in impossible situations before and had always found a way out, but now time passed with no trace or hint of survival. Days turned into weeks, then months. The men and women living on the frontier could only speculate on the fate of the twenty-eight lost men.
When a party of travelers trudged into Kentucky, they met some settlers leaving, who, as one of the travelers recalled, “informed us that Colonel Boone and 28 men were captured at the Blue Lick while making salt and carried off or murdered by the Indians.” (The actual count of the other men taken, besides Boone, was twenty-seven.) The hopeless uncertainty of the settlers was encapsulated rhetorically in the two choices of “carried off or murdered.” Virginia governor Patrick Henry wrote to a military official, “I don’t believe all of Boone’s party are lost.” Henry’s need to express optimism reflected the fact that others were much less hopeful, and even that more optimistic speculation was hardly rosy.
A little more than two months after Boone and his men disappeared, a small group of newcomers that included a young man named Daniel Trabue reached Boonesboro in time for Easter Sunday. The reaction of the residents to the ragtag newcomers’ arrival spoke to their isolation and increasing desperation. “The people,” Trabue wrote, “all ran out over Joyed to see strangers come to their town or Fort.” Despite the fact that the fort was running out of provisions, the people at Boonesboro were “remarkable kind and hospetable to us with what they had,” and gave them something to eat.
Trabue and his party only stayed for a short time, and the fort remained weakened, with one militiaman describing the residents as “dirty, lousy, ragged, & half starved.” The structure on one side of the fort was open and vulnerable to attack. Established leaders were in short supply among the dwindling number of the men. Simon Butler (Simon Kenton’s ongoing alias as he hid from murder charges) had stepped into an active role after Boone’s gunshot injury in the April onslaught outside the fort that killed Daniel Goodman. Boone had called Butler over after that incident to deliver praise in his usual understated way: “Simon, you have behaved like a man today.” But Butler also came to the attention of George Rogers Clark, the American officer spearheading frontier affairs, who recruited Butler away from Boonesboro to scout Indian and British operations. Adding more secrets to the ones he already kept, Butler would serve Clark as a spy—in the clandestine sense, as well as in the sense of being a scout. The hard-charging William Bailey Smith had joined the rescue mission when the girls were kidnapped—with trigger-happy results when he wielded his weapon too early—but Smith now was also away on official business for Clark, trying to drum up two hundred recruits to become soldiers. Nathaniel Henderson, a brother of Boonesboro mastermind Richard Henderson, followed his brother’s footsteps in departing from Boonesboro after its legal setbacks, though remaining behind was the young enslaved man, London, whom he’d brought with him. One Boonesboro resident called London “a real soldier.”
The nearby settlement at Harrodsburg, receiving the news of the saltmakers’ capture, formed a company of men to travel to Boonesboro to offer help, which included Ambrose Coffee, an Irish immigrant and soldier who decided to remain at the fort. David Bundrin (also spelled Bondurant), known as a Dutchman (though like other “Dutchmen” possibly German), and his family settled amid the wilderness around the same time that Boone and the saltmakers were taken. Isolation left the Bundrins vulnerable, and within a few months they also moved into the Boonesboro compound.
In addition to these individuals and their families, the militia already staying at the fort provided trained military leaders, but they were largely out of their element in the Kentucky wilderness. Militia assignments to go into Kentucky already had been controversial, with some settlers outraged that their fathers, sons, and brothers were sent to protect the desolate reaches of the frontier instead of remaining in their own communities in Virginia or North Carolina, where they would have their own battles brought on by the Revolutionary War.
Facing the scarcity and dire circumstances of Boonesboro, soldiers began to clash. Thomas Dillard and John Donaldson, two of the militiamen, vied for command. Meat was so hard to come by that soldiers began to kill animals owned by Boonesboro families. Without the salt that Boone’s expedition had aimed to provide, hunters had to use meat more quickly. One of Donaldson’s allies, Lieutenant Hutchings, shot and killed a steer that belonged to Richard Callaway. Callaway, according to another militiaman, “swore that if any man killed another head of his stock, that he would shoot him.” The fractures intensified, and the rift was soon considered all-out mutiny. On one side were Donaldson and Hutchings; on the other were Dillard and, as the clues indicate, Richard Callaway. The sparse record on the militia’s infighting in Boonesboro also points to another particularly formidable leader allied to the mutineers: Rebecca Boone.
Daniel Boone’s absence affected all the residents, but none more so than Rebecca. As months continued to pass without any trace of the saltmakers, she came to accept the terrible likelihood that her husband was dead. It was a devastating turn. As a descendant later commented, Rebecca and Daniel had been companions in “toils, pleasures, sorrows.” But Rebecca was also a woman who believed one had to be prepared, mentally and logistically, to move on at a moment’s notice. Facing stark reality had been a dismal prerequisite of the life they led. With no reason to believe that Boone was alive, a “cast down” Rebecca decided to leave Boonesboro to go to North Carolina, where she and the children could stay with her side of the family. Rebecca’s state of mind was described as “oppressed with the distresses of the country, and bereaved.” A testament to her influence over the family, Boones’ grown children and their spouses followed Rebecca’s lead and prepared to go. It seemed likely to be the end, not just of Daniel Boone’s immediate family in Kentucky, but of Boonesboro, at least the Boonesboro that anybody had known. The so-called mutineers, meanwhile, were described by a witness as having “went in with Colonel Donaldson and Mrs. Boone,” indicating Rebecca’s shared leadership with Donaldson (future father-in-law of Andrew Jackson, the military officer and eventual president of the United States) over the breakaway militiamen, who also determined to go to North Carolina.
Only one holdout prevented unanimity in the Boone family’s decision to leave: Jemima. She refused to believe her father was dead. She could point to the fact that Boone had been gone for longer stretches in the past. On Rebecca’s side of the argument, the fact that he had disappeared after Cornstalk’s murder, in the era of Blackfish, meant that revenge had now been exacted for the Shawnee killed when liberating Jemima. On Jemima’s side of the debate, her own rescue proved that Boones could find a way to come through even hopeless situations. Moreover, she had witnessed firsthand the complex dynamics between the Indians and the settlers, even in moments of intense hostility. She dug into her belief that her father was alive when she refused to obey her mother’s edict to leave. Boone had maintained faith that Jemima was alive after she was taken, and now with the roles reversed she would do the same for him.
A battle of wills became a stalemate. On approximately May 1, 1778, four months after Boone had left Boonesboro with the saltmakers, Rebecca and her caravan of family and mutineers from the militia packed up and departed. It was a bleak exodus, leaving behind not only Jemima but also Boone’s dream for the future. Jemima remained with her husband and an increasingly skeletal roster of Boonesboro residents. Those who stayed had to admit that Rebecca was probably right about the fate of her husband. Even Daniel’s favorite cat sauntered away from his cabin and disappeared from the fort. To Jemima, watching her family recede into the horizon would have been as heart-wrenching as the bloodstained grass had been for Boone when he’d searched the wilderness against the odds for her.
