Daniel Boone: The Pioneer of Kentucky
assaults which the Indians were capable of making. He now resolved
immediately to return to Clinch river, and bring his family out to share
with him his new and attractive home.
CHAPTER VI.
_Sufferings of the Pioneers._
Emigration to Boonesborough.--New Perils.--Transylvania
Company.--Beneficence of its Laws.--Interesting Incident.--Infamous
conduct of Great Britain.--Attack on the Fort.--Reinforcements.--Simon
Kenton and his Sufferings.--Mrs. Harvey.
The fortress at Boonesborough consisted of ten strong log huts arranged
in a quadrangular form, enclosing an area of about one-third of an acre.
The intervals, as before stated, between the huts, were filled with
strong palisades of timber, which, like the huts themselves, were
bullet-proof. The outer sides of the cabins, together with the
palisades, formed the sides of the fort exposed to the foe. Each of
these cabins was about twenty feet in length and twelve or fifteen in
breadth. There were two entrance gates opposite each other, made of
thick slabs of timber, and hung on wooden hinges. The forest, which was
quite dense, had been cut away to such a distance as to expose an
assailing party to the bullets of the garrison. As at that time the
Indians were armed mainly with bows and arrows, a few men fully supplied
with ammunition within the fort could bid defiance to almost any number
of savages. And subsequently, as the Indians obtained fire-arms, they
could not hope to capture the fort without a long siege, or by assailing
it with a vastly overwhelming superiority of numbers. The accompanying
illustration will give the reader a very correct idea of this renowned
fortress of logs, which was regarded as the Gibraltar of Indian warfare.
Having finished this fort Daniel Boone, leaving a sufficient garrison
for its security, set out for his home on the Clinch river to bring his
wife and family to the beautiful land he so long had coveted for their
residence. It seems that his wife and daughters were eager to follow
their father to the banks of the Kentucky, whose charms he had so
glowingly described to them. Several other families were also induced to
join the party of emigration. They could dwell together in a very social
community and in perfect safety in the spacious cabins within the
fortress. The river would furnish them with an unfailing supply of
water. The hunters, with their rifles, could supply them with game, and
with those rifles could protect themselves while laboring in the fields,
which with the axe they had laid open to the sun around the fort. The
hunters and the farmers at night returning within the enclosure, felt
perfectly safe from all assaults.
Daniel Boone commenced his journey with his wife and children, and
others who joined them, back to Boonesborough in high spirits. It was a
long journey of several hundred miles, and to many persons it would seem
a journey fraught with great peril, for they were in danger almost every
mile of the way, of encountering hostile Indians. But Boone, accustomed
to traversing the wilderness, and accompanied by well armed men, felt no
more apprehensions of danger than the father of a family would at the
present day in traveling by cars from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania.
It was beautiful autumnal weather when the party of pioneers commenced
its adventurous tour through the wilderness, to find a new home five
hundred miles beyond even the remotest frontiers of civilization. There
were three families besides that of Boone, and numbered in all
twenty-six men, four women, and four or five boys and girls of various
ages. Daniel Boone was the happy leader of this heroic little band.
In due time they all arrived safely at Boonesborough "without having
encountered," as Boone writes, "any other difficulties than such as are
common to this passage." As they approached the fort, Boone and his
family, for some unexplained reason, pressed forward, and entered the
fortress a few days in advance of the rest of the party. Perhaps Boone
himself had a little pride to have it said, that Mrs. Boone and her
daughter were the first of her color and sex that ever stood upon the
banks of the wild and beautiful Kentucky.
A few days after their arrival, the emigrants had a very solemn
admonition of the peril which surrounded them, and of the necessity of
constant vigilance to guard against a treacherous and sleepless foe. One
of their number who had sauntered but a short distance from the fort,
lured by the combined beauty of the field, the forest and the river, was
shot by a prowling Indian, who, raising the war-whoop of exultation and
defiance, immediately disappeared in the depths of the wilderness.
Colonel Henderson and his partners, anxious to promote the settlement of
the country, by organising parties of emigration, were busy in making
known through the settlements the absolute security of the fort at
Boonesborough, and the wonderful attractions of the region, in soil,
climate, and abounding game. Henderson himself soon started with a large
party, forty of whom were well armed. A number of pack-horses conveyed
the luggage of the emigrants. Following the very imperfect road that
Boone with much skill had engineered, which was quite tolerable for
pack-horses in single file, they reached Boonesborough early in the
following spring.
The Transylvania Company was in the full flush of successful experiment.
Small parties of emigrants were constantly arriving. Boonesborough was
the capital of the colony. Various small settlements were settled in its
vicinity. Colonel Henderson opened a land office there, and in the
course of a few months, over half a million of acres were entered, by
settlers or speculators. These men did not purchase the lands outright,
but bound themselves to pay a small but perpetual rent. The titles,
which they supposed to be perfectly good, were given in the name of the
"proprietors of the Colony of Transylvania, in America."
Soon four settlements were organised called Boonesborough, Harrodsburg,
Boiling Spring, and St. Asaph. Colonel Henderson, on the twenty-third of
May, 1775, as president or rather sovereign of this extraordinary realm,
summoned a legislature consisting of delegates from this handful of
pioneers, to meet at his capital, Boonesborough. Henderson presided.
Daniel and his brother Squire were delegates from Boonesborough. A
clergyman, the Reverend John Leythe, opened the session with prayer.
Colonel Henderson made a remarkable and admirable speech. This
extraordinary legislature represented only a constituency of one hundred
and fifty souls. But the Colonel presented to them very clearly the true
republican principle of government. He declared that the only legitimate
source of political power is to be found in the will of the people, and
added:
"If any doubts remain among you with respect to the force and efficiency
of whatever laws you now or hereafter make, be pleased to consider that
all power is originally in the people. Make it their interest,
therefore, by impartial and beneficent laws, and you may be sure of
their inclination to see them enforced."
Rumors of these extraordinary proceedings reached the ears of Lord
Dunmore. He considered the whole region of Kentucky as included in the
original grant of Virginia, and that the Government of Virginia alone
had the right to extinguish the Indian title to any of those lands. He
therefore issued a proclamation, denouncing in the severest terms the
"unlawful proceedings of one Richard Henderson and other disorderly
persons, his associates." The legislature continued in session but three
days, and honored itself greatly by its energetic action, and by the
character of the laws which it inaugurated. One bill was introduced for
preserving game; another for improving the breed of their horses; and it
is worthy of especial record that a law was passed prohibiting profane
swearing and Sabbath breaking.
The moral sense of these bold pioneers was shocked at the desecration of
the Creator's name among their sublime solitudes.
The controversy between the Transylvania Company and the Government of
Virginia was short but very sharp. Virginia could then very easily send
an army of several thousand men to exterminate the Kentucky colony. A
compromise was the result. The title of Henderson was declared "null and
void." But he received in compensation a grant of land on the Ohio,
about twelve miles square, below the mouth of Green River. Virginia
assumed that the Indian title was entirely extinguished, and the region
called Transylvania now belonged without encumbrance to the Old
Dominion.
Still the tide of emigration continued to flow into this beautiful
region. Among others came the family of Colonel Calloway, consisting of
his wife and two daughters. For a long time no Indians had been seen in
the vicinity of Boonesborough. No one seemed to apprehend the least
danger from them, and the people in the fort wandered about as freely as
if no foe had ever excited their fears. An accident occurred which sent
a tremor of dismay through the whole colony, and which we will describe
as related to the intelligent historian, Peck, from the lips of one of
the parties, who experienced all the terrors of the scene:
"On the fourteenth of July, 1776, Betsey Calloway, her sister Frances,
and Jemima Boone, a daughter of Daniel Boone, the two last about
fourteen years of age, carelessly crossed the river opposite
Boonesborough in a canoe, at a late hour in the afternoon. The trees
and shrubs on the opposite bank were thick, and came down to the water's
edge. The girls, unconscious of danger, were playing and splashing the
water with their paddles, until the canoe floating with the current,
drifted near the shore. Five stout Indians lay there concealed, one of
whom, noiseless and stealthy as the serpent, crawled down the bank until
he reached the rope that hung from the bow, turned its course up the
stream, and in a direction to be hidden from the view of the fort. The
loud shrieks of the captured girls were heard, but too late for their
rescue.
"The canoe, their only means of crossing, was on the opposite shore, and
none dared to risk the chance of swimming the river, under the
impression that a large body of savages was concealed in the woods.
Boone and Calloway were both absent, and night came on before
arrangements could be made for their pursuit. Next morning by daylight
we were on the track, and found they had prevented our following them by
walking some distance apart through the thickest canes they could find.
We observed their course, and on which side they had left their sign and
traveled upwards of thirty miles. We then imagined they would be less
cautious in traveling, and made a turn in order to cross their trace,
and had gone but a few miles when we found their tracks in a buffalo
path. We pursued and overtook them on going about ten miles, as they
were kindling a fire to cook.
"Our study had been more to get the prisoners without giving the Indians
time to murder them, after they discovered us, than to kill them. We
discovered each other nearly at the same time. Four of us fired, and all
of us rushed on them, which prevented them from carrying away anything,
except one shot-gun without ammunition. Mr. Boone and myself had a
pretty fair shoot, just as they began to move off. I am well convinced I
shot one through, and the one he shot dropped his gun. Mine had none.
The place was very thick with canes, and being so much elated on
recovering the three broken-hearted girls, prevented our making further
search. We sent them off without their mocassins, and not one of them
with so much as a knife or a tomahawk."
The Indians seemed to awake increasingly to the consciousness that the